John moves around a Web site that allows users to view articles for a small charge. Because the use of cookies is just now becoming an official standard, there may be some subtle differences that do not affect the way in which they work. For instance, Internet Explorer uses one folder to store separate cookie files, while Netscape uses a single file for all of it's cookies. Client state information can be stored in several ways. For example, server administrators and programmers can create a database application that tracks and stores data that they would otherwise have managed with cookies.
Cookies are in essence, simply a programming convenience as well as a user convience.
Cookies are designed to be read by only the site that originally issues them, not by other sites. The State Management subworking group of the Internet Engineering Task Force 's HTTP Working Group is currently working on a formal Internet draft for a cookie specification . Netscape has added the portion of the IETF specification in Communicator 4.0, that provides users with the ability to reject cookies that are attempting to send to the originating server. This enables users who are concerned with privacy issues to reject the placement of cookies by any advertisers that may track users on sites and then send that specific information back to their corporate server. Cookies can be used to store any information that the user volunteers.