Cookies

I think we all love cookies. That’s a worldwide given. I know I do, and the members of my expanding family love them, too. My eldest grandchild is Katya, all of 10 years old, who was president of her Grade 4 class at Assumption Convent and is an incoming fifth grader. Katya loves cookies and baking them, likewise, so that a number of times she has baked for me her combination “choco-chip-oatmeal cookies.” More than anything, by the way, I love my granddaughter because she is a good person, is sensitive and sentimental.

We all love cookies, and very definitely “cookies” of the Internet variety, too. I miss the times that Katya used to send me e-mail messages, but it has been ballet dancing that has removed a lot of her computer time, for she loves dance and music.

Let me tell you that being sent choco-chip-oatmeal cookies baked by a grandchild and sent to her lola on Valentine’s Day is one of the most thrilling and touching experiences of life.

Internet cookies, just like the cookies that are chewed on in millions of quantities throughout the world, happen every day; in fact, millions and millions of them. But the parallelism ends there.

It has never been a secret that people are tracking other people’s every move on a website and that they are storing that information in files with the intention of analyzing it later. Just as correct but less generally understood is the fact that Internet users or their browsers, without their knowledge, often accept a cookie from a site — a short bit of text that the site can store on a user’s machine. These cookies empower a website to recognize return visitors and give the users the benefit of avoiding the tedious process of typing their user names and passwords at sites that require them.

Cookies help sites keep track of information like the contents of what is called a “shopping basket” or a mailing address. When an Internet user’s computer accesses an Internet site, another computer at that site receives and processes the access request. Cookies speed up the process because if one is not in the browser, each request for a document or graphic is handled that way each time. If a cookie is involved in the process, the site knows what the user has wanted in the past and gives it to him or her again.

The cookie brain functions all the time. Remember, we are talking about shopping baskets of information like a corporate profile, a mailing address, or a fertile and versatile host of information hits and tidbits that go into what we now call the “shopping basket.” Those sites that insert cookies in a user’s browser have software that handles requests from browsers for pages and images, and can issue a unique identifying number the first time a browser makes a request for pages.

This unique number is sent to the browser, which stores it as a cookie on the Internet user’s hard drive, which is where the IP address is located, so that thereafter, if the user wants to go to the same site, the browser sends the identifying number as part of the request. In addition, cookies also help create accurate records of all site visits.

And of course, at the back of all these is the phenomenon of the Internet brain at work — without much fanfare because these are all elementary, but brilliantly and stupefyingly undertaken as only the Internet can.

Virtually all major electronic sites utilize cookies to send a browser a session identifier that allows a user to deposit items in the shopping basket, then browse other sites and return within hours or even days without losing any of those selections.

As a web surfer, we can pick up cookies without even being aware of it, from some advertising companies and those that sell demographic information or any statistical characteristics of the information. A firm, for instance, with a banner ad on a web page, might send an identifying cookie to a user’s computer, enabling the company to track that browser if it called up pages at other web sites carrying the company’s ads.

The advertiser would also be able, through an agreement with a commercial site, to obtain a copy of personal information given to the shopping site when making a purchase and be able to associate that information with the browser.

I responded to quite a number of e-mails I received after I wrote my two-part series on online privacy. Indeed privacy should be protected, but always taking into consideration the fundamental right of freedom of expression and of the press. Cookies are part and parcel of technological progress and in this day and age, such progress is exponential. As I have said in the past, this is limited only by man’s genius and imagination, to which we can add man’s commercialism.

Samuel Veneracion, a young graduate of a technology school in the Philippines who did not indicate the school he graduated from, sent me an e-mail keynoting online privacy as a right that has to be studied “rigidly and rigorously,” because he says the openness of the Internet has destroyed it. An e-mail from Prof. Ernest T. Edwards from Hollywood, California, echoed Mr. Veneracion’s concern. He said he wrote a thesis two years ago on e-privacy in relation to the lives of celebrities in the movie industry. He promised to e-mail me his thesis but 10 days have elapsed and I still have not received it. It would be interesting to read his concrete examples vis-à-vis Hugh Grant, Richard Gere, Kevin Costner, etc.

What I would like to introduce here at this point is the accepted theory that if you are a political figure, like a government official in any civilized democracy, the saying that “your life is an open book” applies.

In the case of the movie stars who approach publicity as a tool to enhance or achieve celebrity status, I think the bench should be more circumspect in the determination of whether their right to e-privacy has been abused or violated.

The quality of the kind of demographic information that one can pick up with utmost ease through a cookie can really denigrate and defame, but I guess that’s what these national and international celebrities have to take, whether the matter involved is personal, political, criminal or otherwise.

As early as 1981, the book The Naked Computer was published, before the Internet phenomenon, of course. Authored by Rochester and Gantz, the book is an excellent and humorous “almanac of computer lore, wizardry, personalities, memorabilia and tomfoolery.”

It is an outstanding, informative book with an unsurpassed sense of humor. As early as then, the descriptive word given to the computer was “naked.”

As I have said before, anything stored in the computer is public. The computer is as naked as naked can be, and so is the Internet.

There are now quite a number of remedial measures being evolved to alleviate this nudity, which I could tackle in a future article given the interest the topic of online privacy and its fascinating rudiments has generated.

By the way, The Naked Computer was given to me by Katya’s father, who is my son, also on Valentine’s Day. Just as lovely Katya chews her cookies, the world has to chew on their Internet cookies to make their professional lives more efficient and fruitful.

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Thanks for your e-mails sent to jtl@pldtdsl.net.