Copyright © The Rivendell Garden/John Kingdon 2015-2017

Terms and Conditions          About Cookies

You know the phrase “good cop - bad cop”. Well cookies are like that. There are good ones and bad ones.

Cookies are tiny little text files that are generated by just about every web site on the planet. Without the good ones, most web sites wouldn’t work. For example, if you’re shopping on-line, cookies will be used to store the contents of your shopping basket until you check out. When you’re jumping around a web site, it’ll usually be a cookie that remembers where you came from so when you hit the back button you don’t just go back to the last page you were looking at but to the point in that page where you were. Most cookies like this are temporary and when you leave the site they cease to work - for some reason, many are not deleted although they are simply taking up disk space as they’re otherwise dead.

There might be permanent good cookies. If you log into a web site and there’s a tick box that says “remember me” and you tick it, the site will place a permanent cookie on your computer so that the next time you visit the site it’ll look for that cookie and when it finds it, will remember that you’re you and you either don’t have to log in again or your user name/ID is filled in for you and you just have to enter a password.

Then there are the bad cookies. Well, in a way it’s not the cookies that are bad, it’s the way in which they can be used by others. The phrase “tracking cookie” is usually used to describe them. Let’s say you visit a web site that sells jewellery and spend some time browsing it. That site may place a tracking cookie on your computer that says “I like jewellery”. Then as you browse around the internet, various sites that make money from advertising content will find this cookie and display adverts about jewellery.

One aspect of cookies often forgotten is that as they are usually not deleted immediately, even if they are harmless, someone getting at your computer could look through your list of cookies to get an idea of where you’ve been - cookie files usually have the name of the web site that generated them in their filename. So if your better half found a series of cookies named like “manporn.com” or “nakedladies.com”, they might get an idea of what you’d been looking at.

I do not make any use of tracking cookies whatsover. I do use session cookies (good cookies). You may, of course, disable cookies on your computer but if you do so, my site, like many others , may not work as you want.

If you use this site then, by doing so, you expressly consent to my sites’ use of cookies as described above.

About Cookies (More Legal Stuff)