Cookies
Explore the role of cookies in web applications, including how they store user preferences and metadata. Understand the difference between first-party and third-party cookies, their use in tracking and advertising, and how to view cookies in browser developer tools to enhance security awareness.
We'll cover the following...
Introduction to cookies
The HTTP protocol is stateless and does not store information about different users on a website. This led to the development of cookies.
Cookies are documents that contain information, largely preferences, about the user browsing a website. For instance, when we’re viewing a website that’s in a foreign language and we change it to a language we understand, that information is saved to a cookie in the local machine. So the next time we visit the same website, it’ll read the cookie that it had saved earlier, and we’ll see that the language being used is the same as the one we’d previously selected. If you’ve ever faced a prompt like the one shown below, then you’ve interacted with cookies and are probably ...