Online privacy is something that should, and most likely is, near the top of most people’s minds as we meander through the websites that mystically and magically tie us all together. While online safety is a serious matter, misinformation can, and does, cause a lot of panic over some of the more harmless and mundane ways in which the Internet actually works.

In the latter half of the 1990s, pandemonium spread throughout the connected world regarding the use of “cookies” — these mysterious and malicious “things” that were tracking our every move and sharing our deepest and darkest secrets. Cookies went from being something no one knew anything about to Internet Public Enemy No. 1. They were blamed for a multitude of ills that might befall a computer. If a computer contracted a virus, surely there was a cookie to blame!

An informed public quickly learned that cookies weren’t as harmful as they might have been led to believe, but remnants of that explosive panic still continue to reverberate today.

A cookie is a nothing more than a small text file that is passed from a website to a user’s computer and is basically used as a means of identifying the user’s