Abstract: Cookies on the Internet have been around for a few years now and have become quite widespread. However, their use has drawn criticism from some privacy experts. They claim that cookies give a website administrator the power to track a user's travels across the Internet - a clear violation of anonymity on the Internet. What is being done to counter this claim is also discussed. A cookie is a small text file placed by a web server in a customer's browser for identification purposes. This small text file (usually less than 1 KB in size) can contain information to identify a user to the web server.1 The cookie is provided during the first encounter between the browser and the web page. At each subsequent connection to the server web, the cookie is sent from the browser to the server together with web page requests.2 This small transfer of a cookie1 can be very convenient for the Internet user. By sending this identifying information, the web server can identify and tailor its web content to its user. This allows the webmaster to develop a number of useful features such as custom formatting of the website, offering personalized services, notifying the user of new material since the last visit, tracking shopping carts, etc.3 Cookies are designed to hide your identity and prevent damage to your computer. Although each browser contains cookies from different websites, web servers can only retrieve cookies set by the same server and no external website accesses these cookies2.4 Furthermore, although cookies reside on a user's computer, they cannot cause any damage to the system as they are created as non-executable text files.5 It is true, however, that many users fear cookies as a threat to the privacy of their identity. They believe that personal information can be spread to unknown sites with unknown consequences.6 This turns out to be only a minor threat as cookies are only available to the webmaster of the website who set the cookies in the first place.3 And as it stands In This case, cookies are mostly made up of identity information that can only be understood by the Web server that set them.7 What is at issue, however, is how Web companies can track, or " track", where a user goes while browsing the Internet. . Website monitoring is useful because it allows webmasters to see how a user moves around their site and, based on this information, improve the website.