What personal info is contained in a cookie ?

When logged into BBS such as this, how much of my personal information is available to the admin or other users.

Also ... what specific information is contained in the cookie ?

IP address ?
Computer name ?
History of the websites I've visited ?

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Code:

vbcodemode
0
[url]www.windowsbbs.com/[/url]
2200
245325853
57845322
3569842267
24683267
*

So here is my cookie for windowsbbs.com.

Each one of the fields corrisponds to a value below. (noting that arie might have fudged around with the defaults... but you get the idea)

Code:

bbuserid -- userid 
bbpassword -- encrypted password 
sessionhash -- sessionhash for maintaining state
bblastvisit -- last visit time 
bbthreadview[] -- last visit time of specific thread 
bbreferrerid -- userid of referrer 
bbstyleid -- styleid of current style 

What is stored in the cookie is up to the site. Some can have some pretty blatent information stored, but for the most part, the worst thats in the cookie is an encrypted form of your password. Now, every time you hit a page on the site, he can ask for your cookie, and watch your every move. Note if you click on one of the names to the left, you will get a header with some info about what that user is doing, heres mine:

Last Activity: Today 21:01
Viewing Thread What personal info is contained in a cookie ? @ 21:01

Some sites can really invade your privacy with this, doubleclick, specificclick and thousands others, by bridging thier ads across mulitple sites, and watching your every visit. Over time, by using a user-id, they can develop information about you, and see what you like, and throw targeted advertisements at you, or worse, by developing purchasing habit trails.


Now, is this a concern? not really... You can nuke your cookies every so often and make em start over.. Or run something like proxomitron, to feed them a new cookie everytime you visit.. But then you will miss out on all the cool stuff, like unified passport login, amazon 1 click shopping, etc.etc.. Its powerful technology, that power can be used for good or evil.


If you have a 'frequent shopper' card at the supermarket, they are doing the same thing to you. Last week, it printed out some heavy discount coupons for me for some junk food i used to buy, to lure me back into buying it again. You didnt think they were giving you 10% off just because you come back to the store?

 

Yes it is a case of big (or small) brother looking at you.
I guess the trick is not to get to paranoid as it can quickly turn you into a bitter and twisted individual who is always looking over his/her shoulder.

Be carefull about what information you give out. But if a site wants to track me then I don't really care as the info as highlighted by Joe is fairly inocuous. I also delete my cookies every day or two, and don't mind having to login to a site on each visit.

The day I start getting paranoid about using the internet is the day I sell all my PC's.

 

Thanks for the info.

The reason I asked is that I never had a problem with spam until I set up some online banking accounts.
Now I get 7 or 8 emails a day offering stuff like mortgage refinancing, debt consolidation ...
When I started using an online prescription service, I started getting emails from prescription companies.

I think this is probably more a case of email address lists being sold or hacked.

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