Cookies, not the delicious sugary kind you eat, are small files that track the websites you visit online. Some argue cookies are a serious threat to our privacy.
Even those of us who are enthusiastic about using the Web for what it does best, including access to highly customized information, agree there’s something potentially creepy about cookies. How are personal data used? Are our names, addresses and financial and health records really secret? Is anonymity permanent? These questions come just as what technology can do is changing our expectations about what information remains personal. We worry about cookies despite many of us voluntarily becoming open books via sites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, which are designed to share personal information that until recently would have been considered confidential.
