Definitions like that are fairly common in the press. The problem is, none of that information is correct. Cookies are not programs, and they cannot run like a program does. Therefore they cannot gather any information on their own. Nor can they collect any personal information about you from your machine.
Cookies allow a web site to store information on a user's machine and later retrieve it.
The pieces of information are stored as name-value pairs . For example, a web site might generate a unique ID number for each visitor and store the ID number on each user's machine using a cookie file. If you use Microsoft's Internet Explorer to browse the web, you can see all of the cookies that are stored on your machine. When I look in that directory on my machine, I find 165 files. Each file is a text file that contains name-value pairs, and there is one file for each web site that has placed cookies on my machine.