HTTP Cookie

Overview
A HTTP or Browser Cookie is a piece of text data that can be transferred from site to site, as an attempt to identify individual users. Cookies are stored on the user’s computer via a web browser to record browsing information to be recovered and used later on. This information can help to identify an individual user, to keep track of user visits and activity. This helps websites to remember specific users, login users automatically, and remember user preferences when interacting with a site. Since cookies track behavior, they also cause privacy concerns because malicious sites can gain access to this collected information.

Issues with Traditional Browser Cookies
There are several concerns in using browser cookies to collect internet users' information.

Cookies are Device-Specific

Cookies collect data from a single browser, making it unreliable in building a profile of an individual. Individuals could not only spread their data across multiple browsers (and thus multiple cookies) but if multiple individuals are using a single browser, they may also share the same cookie. In these circumstances, cookies, as they currently are, aren’t a reliable way to interpret data because they are device, not human, specific.

Cookies Degrade User-Experience

Cookies slow browser load time along with site latency and this harms the user experience. Users consider page load times to be a critical factor in their experience with the internet. When sites are too slow, users will move onto the next faster available option.

There Are Many Cookie-Free Environments

Cookies don’t work in mobile apps and prove ineffective when it comes to mobile browsers due to inconsistency issues. Devices such as wearables and smart home devices will operate in environments without cookies. These technologies continue to become more popular and increase in their presence, which will cause the significance of the browser cookie to shrink.

Cookies Play a Role in Creating Filter Bubbles

Cookies play a partial role in creating over-personalized search results for internet users. To step out of this intellectual isolation, users may choose to disable cookies from being tracked. Cookies for the Future: Integrating Cookies with a Semantic Web

Cookies for the Future: Integrating Cookies with a Semantic Web
Cox in her work The Semantic Web as Semantic Soup (2004), discusses the idea behind a semantic cookie. Semantic cookies go beyond the HTTP cookie by integrating the idea behind browser cookies with the implementation of a semantic web.

User information can be conveyed in a more transparent fashion from site to site, with no need for user interaction due to the machine-readable structure that conveys semantic structure or meaning. Essentially, a Resource Description Framework (RDF) would be used to identify and describe specific individuals (Cox, 2004). This RDF information would be contained within a document that follows a user on the internet. This would resolve the issue of identifying individual users, but does not yet include a description which would better protect user security.