Most often, Web sites use it for marketing information: How many visits, how often, when the last visit occurred, downloads, and so on. In general, cookies are not an invasion of privacy because they are only accessible to the site that saved them in the first place. It could conceivably be a problem if other sites could access your hard drive and see what other sites you were visiting, but that's not the case. The original implementation of cookies did allow this, but that was disabled long ago. Currently, only the Web site that sets a cookie can access it. There is one way a cookie can work to the advantage of advertisers: A cookie could be set on your hard drive saying you've been to a Web site or clicked on a banner. This could be used to vary the ads that you see while you're surfing, or serve you ads that they think you might like, based on your past click-through history. A site can't track your movement in general, only within that particular site. For example, horse racing to horse vet, they can make sure you get horse related banner ads. Some people see this as an invasion of privacy. Different Web browsers (Netscape and Internet Explorer) handle cookies in different ways. Most browsers are set by default to accept all cookies, but you can easily set them to refuse all cookies by unchecking the Accept all cookies box in your browser's Settings menu. You can also select Prompt before accepting. The drawback to refusing all cookies is you might not be able to get certain portions of Web sites, as cookies are a prerequisite to getting around on some Web sites. The truth is, it can be more of a hassle to select Prompt before accepting, since some sites set thousands of cookies in every session. It might be much more annoying to have that dialog box come up for every one. Another problem of the past is that the cookies took up space on your hard drive. That may still be true if you have an old computer with a hard disk of less than one Gig. (to find out...double click on "My Computer" on the opening screen. Then right click on the "C" drive. Open "Properties" and see how much space you have available.) However, most computers today have 10 to ? Gigabytes and there is plenty of room for a few hundred bytes of a cookie. If you want to remove the cookies form your disk, either use a disk cleaning program or remove them by going into the windows and cookies folders. That second suggestion is NOT recommended for those new to computers and Windows.