Web cookies or HTTP cookies is an individual unique id or value stored by a user’s web browser. Web cookies can be used for verification/authentication, storing site preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session.web analytics, visitor analytics, google analytics, cookies
Cookies consist of one or more individual unique id or value pairs containing bits of information, which may be encrypted for information privacy and data security purposes. Cookies used to maintain data related to the user during navigation, possibly across multiple visits. The cookies are sent as an HTTP header by a web server with a unique session identifier. The web browser will send back that session identifier unchanged each time it accesses that server.
Cookies used to track internet users’ web browsing habits. This can also be done in part by using the IP address of the computer requesting the page or the referrer field of the HTTP header, but cookies allow for a greater precision. For example, if a user requests a page of the site, but the request contains no cookie, the server presumes that this is the first page visited by the user; the server creates a random string and sends it as a cookie back to the browser together with the requested page. From this point on, the cookie will be automatically sent by the browser to the server every time a new page from the site is requested; the server sends the page as usual, but also stores the URL of the requested page, the date/time of the request, and the cookie in a log file. By looking at the log file, it is then possible to find out which pages the user has visited and in what sequence.
Without cookies, each visit to a Web page or part of a Web page is an inaccessible event, mostly not linked to all other views of the pages of the same site. The cookie setter can specify a deletion date, in which case the cookie will be removed on that date. If the cookie setter does not specify a date, the cookie is removed once the user quits his or her browser. Cookies can also be limited in scope to a specific domain, sub domain or path on the web server which created them.
web browsers cookies, web servers, visitors loyaltyIf more than one browser is used on a computer, each usually has a separate storage area for cookies. Hence cookies do not identify a person, but a combination of a user account, a computer, and a Web browser. Thus, anyone who uses multiple accounts, computers, or browsers has multiple sets of cookies. Likewise, cookies do not differentiate between multiple users who share the same user account, computer, and browser.
Users may be tracked based on the IP address of the computer requesting the page. This method has been available since the introduction of the World Wide Web, as downloading pages requires the server to know the IP address of the computer running the browser, if any is used. The server can track this information whether or not cookies are used. However, these addresses are typically less reliable in identifying a user than cookies because computers and proxies may be shared by several users, and the same computer may be assigned different IP addresses in different work sessions.
Tracking by IP addresses can be reliable in some situations, such as the case of always-on broadband connections which retain the same IP address for long periods of time, so long as the power stays on. Both cookies and IP addresses have their strengths and weaknesses for determining the uniqueness of a visitor. It is impossible to be 100% accurate Analysis.
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