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Storing Personal Information and Tracking User Behavior While cookies by themselves cannot dig or research your information or search your computer, they do store personal information in at least two ways—form information and ad tracking.
Cookies are a common technology that allow websites to recognize you. But they can also give hackers enough data to steal your personal information. Search for anything online — and the next thing you know that item is following you on the internet in the form of an ad at just about every website you visit.
Where do cookies store information?
If you’re wondering “where are cookies stored,” it’s simple: your web browser will store it locally to remember the “name-value pair” that identifies you. If a user returns to that site in the future, the web browser returns that data to the web server in the form of a cookie.
It’s a lot easier to answer what’s not acceptable to store in a cookie. Anything that should remain secure shouldn’t be stored. That includes passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc. I think it’s okay to store a user’s login name, since that information really isn’t sensitive.
Cookies can store a wide range of information, including personally identifiable information (such as your name, home address, email address, or telephone number).
Is it OK to store session ID in cookies?
Don’t store anything in a Cookie that will allow your site to be hacked or accessed without going through proper channels. Usually, just a session ID or user ID is stored in a cookie, and often in a form intended to be opaque to anyone but the cookie consumer.
For one domain name, each cookie is limited to 4,096 bytes. This total can exist as one name-value pair of 4 kilobytes (KB) or as up to 20 name-value pairs that total 4 KB. If the computer does not have sufficient space to store the cookie, the cookie is discarded. It is not truncated.