Many modern websites prominently announce to users that, in order to use them, you must have “cookies” enabled in your web browser. Although it sounds like a request for baked goods, computer cookies are tinier and far more numerous. They are small pieces of data used by websites to store information on a user’s computer, in order to provide a working record of previous actions, and thus to serve various functions such as authenticating a user, keeping track of purchases or inputs, and saving information about them between visits.
Computer cookies are properly known as HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the basic data foundation of the web) cookies, and were named after a computing concept called the “magic cookie” principle. Magic cookies embodied the idea of using small packets of data as tokens of exchange between a user and computer program: the data token would be used to represent a user’s past actions, and could effectively be “handed in” to the same or a different program in the future. The data itself would be encoded, making it effectively invisible to the programs in question until it was actually handed over—an everyday kind of informational “magic.”
As to the word cookie itself, one of the more popular theories about its origin points to the Xerox Corporation in the early 1970s, where some employees first came up with the idea of storing small chunks of information about users’ actions that could be exchanged between different computers and programs. Inspired by the popular television program the Andy Williams Show, in which a bear often followed around the protagonist demanding a gift of cookies, they decided to give their little exchangeable crumbs of data the same name.126
In the sense of the sweet biscuit Andy Williams’s bear was desperately seeking, cookie entered American English language at the very start of the eighteenth century, coming from the Dutch word koekje meaning a “little cake.” It wasn’t until 1994, however, that cookies first found their way onto the world wide web, courtesy of the programmer Lou Montulli, who realized that the practice of using magic cookies to communicate information securely between programs had enormous potential for enhancing the functionality of websites—and duly coined the term in its online sense.127
Web cookies today come in a variety of flavors: from “secure” cookies, that are permanently encrypted when being transmitted, to “third-party” cookies, which are generated by online services distinct from the website you happen to be visiting.
There are also potentially troublesome cookie types, including “tracking” cookies (sometimes known as “persistent” cookies), which can be used to generate a long-term record of someone’s use of a website; or “zombie” cookies, which are automatically re-created even if a user attempts to delete or remove them.
Despite the cute name, cookies can be a controversial part of the hidden infrastructures of online information, as anyone living in the EU will have noticed thanks to its recent “cookie disclaimer” laws, making it compulsory for all websites to “obtain consent to store a cookie on a user’s or subscriber’s device.” Even when it sounds like a tasty snack, information is often an indigestible business.128