Re: Security: Cookies

> Last I heard about privacy violation by use of cookies:
> - They should provide a web server with personal information about you
> - provide Web Server Administrators (and authorized users) with information
> about the web server usage from a specific user or all users.
> 
> The guy was on the radio and complained cookies where a real violation to
> his privacy and turned it off, also he said servers should announce that
> they are using cookies. RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1 - June 1999) and another document
> discussing HTTP/1.1 did not mension cookies, and they don't see to be
> standard (???) or this is part of HTML (???).
> 
> I desided that monitoring what users like can be done much easier by logging
> the links clicked (redirection) and using counters.
> Maybe other HTTP/1.1 parts provide much greater security vulabilities:
> user-agent, server, via, from, etc.....
> 
> Can I have some more info about this???
> 

I think that cookies do not send any information not previously 
stored in it, and this information has been available to the server 
by other means.

The only value of a cookie is that, as people connect usually via an 
ISP that doesn't give them the same ip address every time, it is 
impossible to relate a person to an ip and store information about it 
using ip as an identifier. So you must send it a cookie and get back 
it later.

I mean that the privacy violation resides on the use of user-agent, 
server, via, from, etc; not the use of cookies.

Regards,


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Antoni Matheu                        |
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Received on Monday, 20 March 2000 02:07:13 UTC