Abuses of Cookies
A poorly constructed commercial site might use cookies to store sensitive information (e.g. credit card numbers) on the hard disk of your PC. This might be a privacy problem if the PC is shared by several users.
A Web site can persuade a browser to send a cookie to a third party site, by embedding an image that comes from the Web server of the third party.
- The third party site might offer the original site collated information on its visitors.
- It may be a particular nuisance if the third party has previously harvested the email address of the user, e.g. by sending them an HTML email containing a cookie-setting icon.
- Moral: configure your browser to only send cookies to the actual page you are visiting.