Cookies: Trick or Treat and How to Tell the Difference
What are Cookies?
If you use the Web very much, you've probably heard the term "cookies" used quite a bit, and not always in a favorable context. Many Web users have gotten the idea that cookies, whatever they are, are at best an invasive nuisance, and at worst, potentially destructive to the hapless hard drive accepting them. To separate myth from reality, it helps to know exactly what a cookie is, and what it's intended to do. A cookie is actually a very small text file which a Web page server sends to your hard drive, in response to your browser's request for a Web page.
What's the Cookie For?
The purpose of the cookie is basically to help a Web site's server recognize a user. The cookie acts as a computerized ticket stub or hand stamp. It's handed to you by a server when you first visit a site, and then later retrieved by the same server. By doing this, the server can better identify the client when they visit, aid their progress through a site, and use the cookie to provide customized information to the user.
You may be thinking, wait a minute – why do I need a ticket just to look at a Web site? It depends on what you want to do at the site. Not all Web sites use cookies. Sites that allow you to order or purchase goods or services use cookies to help them track order info. Sites that allow you to personalize pages use cookies to help the server remember which characteristics you've delineated for your page. Sites with secured information use cookies to help recognize user IDs, or, like the UP site, to help users navigate between secured and unsecured information. Cookies also help Web site managers track which information on their site is most useful and most often accessed, and which pages are seldom visited.
How Much Info Can a Cookie Collect?
A cookie can only acquire the information you make available to a Web site. A cookie cannot "read" your hard drive, or figure out your name or address. If you visit a site that asks for your name and address, and has configured a cookie to store that information, then that site's cookie will retain it. Most sites, however, including the UP site, simply use cookies to track browsing habits or to help the server recognize authenticated users accessing secured information.
Why We Want You to Know About Cookies
Why are we telling you all this? Because we want you to know why we're sending a cookie, and why we hope you'll accept it. We want you to understand that accepting a cookie from our server in no way gives us access to your computer, or any personal information about you (the information you provide through the Customer Registration Request or the Feedback form is used only for internal security purposes. See the UP Web site Privacy Policy for more information regarding UP's protection of personal information.) The cookie for our site, recognizable only to our server, simply helps to identify you and tell us which information you wish to read, and which you don't.
Selective Snacking: How to Choose and Control Cookies
You can configure your browser to accept all cookies, or to alert you every time a cookie is offered. Then you can decide whether to accept it or not. If the cookie has an expiration date, the alert message will tell you that too, so you can see the lifetime of the cookie (many cookies are set to expire as soon as you quit the browser). Beware: refusing cookies can be very annoying, since some servers are set to keep offering the cookie every time you move to a new part of the site, until you accept it. You can also view the cookies you've accepted, and delete them if you wish.
Setting Your Browser to Warn You Before Accepting Cookies (Windows systems only)
If you're using Internet Explorer:
- Select Tools, then
- Select Internet Options.
- Select the Privacy tab.
- Click on the Advanced button.
- Choose one of the three options to regulate your use of cookies.
If you're using Mozilla Firefox:
- Select Tools, then
- Select Options.
- Select the Privacy tab.
Still Curious About Cookies?
Want more information on cookie technology? The Cookie Central site has all the latest info on the use of cookies, including how they're created, some of the uses that have resulted in their bad reputation, and how to delete them, if you wish.
We hope that providing this information will help to clarify how and why UP uses cookies, and set your mind at ease about accepting them the next time you visit our site.