Cookie Question

I'm having to enable cookies on my IE 6.0 browser so I can do online checking. What's the difference in first party cookies and third party cookies? I run CCleaner and Clean Cache regularly, so how harmful to my security will it be if I allow cookies? Thanks for any help.

 

I am sure that someone will give you a more complete and thorough answer but in short first party cookies are the cookies you get directly from the site you visit ie you go to google, they (google) will give you a cookie. A third party cookies is received from a site that has allowed a 'third party' rights on their site namely to gather info. So you go to www.xyz.com who give you a cookie and because xyz.com have allowed abc.com 'privileges' on their site, they (abc.com) will also give you a cookie too.

Cookies will in the main track your surfing habits, running a spyware prog weekly will remove them. If you feel paranoid about this (as I do) you can set up a RamDisk Drive which is created from RAM memory and move your TIF and Cookies folder into it. Then each time you reboot those folders will be atomised and upon reboot XP will rebuild them.

Hope this helps

 

Thanks for the help risk_reversal!