But they can also serve nefarious purposes, when they are used to collect information about a user's home system and send it to a marketer, who may then use it to send unsolicited e-mail, or to a hacker, who might use the machine's Internet Protocol address to crash it during a sensitive communication or activity. So it is worthwhile to consider how to manage cookies, and how to keep the ones you want and discard the ones you don't want. It turns out not to be all that difficult. First of all, most Web browsers allow users to block cookies entirely. But that sledgehammer approach also denies the user the full functionality of the Web.
Many cookie cutters are free, and available for download at a number of sites around the world.
This is just one example of programs that arose due to user demand, and which satisfies an important privacy concern - control over the programs sent by others on the Web into one's computer. Such solutions are a product of the collective ingenuity of the Web's denizens and developers, and cannot be approximated by a single committee or commission's regulations, no matter how well considered and drafted. Another way to block cookies is through the use of a proxy server. A proxy server is just a second server that a user can route his Internet connection through, thereby masking the nature of his actual server. This comes with a tradeoff, of course, since it takes longer for a packet of information to travel to a client when it has to go through two servers instead of one.