The cookies are small pieces of information (text) that are created by Web sites that you are visiting and are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer) along with the Web pages that you are viewing. Some of these cookies are saved to your hard disk and when you visit again the Web site that generated them your browser sends these cookies back to this Web site.



The purpose of the cookies is one of the following things:

- To notify the Web site that you visited it in the past. This information can be used to block some one-time services (for example Web pools, one-time promotional services, etc.).

- To remember your user name and password so that you don't need to enter them the next time when you visit this Web site.

- To remember your personal information that is important to the Web site you are visiting. It can be your name, personal preferences, advertising information, etc.

- To show you a different ad each time when you visit the site or similar ads to one that you clicked in the past.

How to see my cookies?

Cookies are kept in special folder on your hard disk. The location of this folder depends on the version of Windows and whether or not you are using user profiles (accounts). If you have Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows NT or Windows 95 then cookie folder is in one of these locations:

C:WindowsCookies

C:WindowsProfilesCookies

Note that on your computer the Windows directory may not be C:Windows but some other directory. If you don't have Profiles directory in you Windows directory don't worry - this just means that you are not using user profiles.

If you have Windows XP or Windows 2000 then cookie folder is in this location (note that on your PC it can be on other drive instead of drive C:

C:Documents and SettingsCookies

If you have only one user account on Windows XP or Windows 2000 then replace with Administrator to get the paths.

In these folders you can see all persistent cookies that are saved to your user account. The names of the cookie files are in form username@hostname. For example the cookie name administrator@altavista[2] is showing that this cookie came from www.altavista.com and the current computer user was administrator. You can also open the cookie file to see its content but it most cases it will be encoded and not human readable.

How to delete cookies?

You can delete cookies by deleting all text files in the cookie folders on your computer. The locations of cookie folders are given in the previous chapter.

The problem is that even if you delete all cookie files from the cookie folders, most of the information for the cookies will not be deleted because it is saved in the index.dat file. In some cases you can see the index.dat file in the cookie folder but even if you can not see it is there. You can not delete this file because Windows and Internet Explorer use it all the time. The only way to get rid of the cookies for good is to shred the content of the index.dat file with a specialized privacy protection program - Mil Shield. It cleans not only cookies but also the content of all other index.dat files (yes, there are many other index.dat files) along with history, temporary Internet files, recently used documents history, Google or MyWaySearch toolbars search history and many other tracks.