Cookies are small files stored on your computer by web sites. They allow information collected in one page of the website you are visiting to be available to other pages on that website (session cookies), or they allow information you entered while visiting a website to be available for subsequent visits to the website (persistent cookies). Most cookies from web sites are of these flavors and are completely innocuous.
Malicious websites (and I've found several) have a means to use cookies to track what websites and what web pages you visit (these cookies are called 'Spyware' or 'Adware'). Apparently this information can be valuable to marketing firms and who knows who or what else. Frankly I don't thoroughly understand quite how this is done from a technical point of view, but it is done. The best advice for anyone using the web is to be certain you have a reputable adware/spyware removal program running. As I understand it there are many commercially available tools on the market and I have never researched the benefits of one vs. another. Some supposedly good spyware removal programs can be found for free on the web, but be very careful if you choose to go that route- I've come across some that actually is malicious spyware itself or contains computer viruses, and heard of incidents where free spyware finds things on your computer and deletes them after misdiagnosing them as spyware when they are not- innocently, and very rarely, but nonetheless frustrating. The point is to thoroughly check on any program that advertises itself as 'free' spyware, just as you should thoroughly research anything you get on the web from an unknown company or website. Also a 'first party' cookie can only be used by the domain (website or server) that created it (according to the limited knowledge I have of them). 'Third party' cookies are set by one website to be used by another and are probably best avoided in most cases.
As to the cookies we store, they will contain only information you provide to us, and be used to carry that information from a data entry page such as the page where we gather your name and address to the page where you enter your order, or if you are interrupted after entering the information or leave the site and return within the expiration timeframe of the cookie, the cookie will be used to get the information you entered and save you having to retype it all. We will not under any circumstances put sensitive information, such as your credit card number, in a cookie. Our cookies have maximum 24 hour expiration date on them with the exception of the cookie created when you sign up to receive email news (31 days, to be changed to 7 or less in the near future) so they will be invalid and erased by your browser after that time.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (MSIE 6) implements "advanced cookie filtering" (their words) for cookie management. When cookie management is set to the default level in MSIE 6 it will not allow 'persistent' cookies to be saved on your machine unless the site has a machine-readable privacy policy (referred to as a P3P policy-Platform for Privacy Preferences) as described by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C - see http://www.w3.org/P3P/). Since I'm still in the process of setting up a P3P policy for this site, MSIE 6 will not allow me to save persistent cookies on your machine if you are using the default privacy settings so any cookies I save on your machine will be deleted when you close your browser. Until I have a P3P policy in place (and it's a somewhat arduous process) if you're using MSIE 6 you probably have 2 choices:
1) Leave things as they are and be aware that the information this site saves in cookies will not be available if you exit your browser and later return to this site, or
2) Update your internet privacy settings in MSIE 6.
If you choose to update your MSIE 6 privacy settings there are two ways to do this- the first and broadest is to open the browser, select
Tools>Internet Options...
click on the 'Privacy' tab, and move the slider to 'Low' or to 'Accept all Cookies'. I recommend against the 'Accept all Cookies' setting since it leaves your machine wide open to spyware/adware cookies. The 'Low' setting, although not preferred, will prevent many of the common tracking mechanisms of adware/spyware from being used on your machine. The more preferable method is to leave the slider at the default and, for those sites that you feel are trustworthy but don't work properly because they don't yet have a P3P, allow those sites to store persistent cookies on your machine. Do this in MSIE 6 by selecting
Tools>Internet Options...
click on the 'Privacy' tab, click on the 'Sites' button or click on the 'Edit' button (which form you will have apparently depends on the MSIE 6 fixes you have installed), enter the fully-qualified name of the website (for example for this site http://www.inanaturallight.com) and click on the 'Allow' button. Other modern browsers also have cookie management features, for example in one version of Mozilla Firefox I have they can be found by going to
Tools>Options
and clicking on the plus sign (+) next to 'Cookies', in another version I have the policy is modified under
Tools>Cookie Manager or Edit>Preferences>Privacy.
"Crawlers", also known as "spiders" are computer programs that visit websites and gather information from them. Some are good, some are malicious. Crawlers are what make search engines like Google work- they run crawler programs that "crawl the web"- go to websites that they know about (either because they found a link to the website on a site they already knew about, or because the website asked to be registered) and the crawler follows every link it finds on the websites it visits and gathers information from every page it visits. Imagine how much less valuable the web would be if it were not for these crawlers, since you would not be able to do a search on the web without them! Crawlers are not particularly sophisticated though... alot of the fancy programming that goes into making "pretty" web pages makes the links on those pages invisible to crawlers. That's why you'll find duplicate links on some of my pages tucked off at the bottom somewhere, more as time goes on and I convert my links to those fancy buttons... the crawlers can't see the links inside the buttons that you intuitively know will take you to the page you're looking for, and I want the crawlers to find my pages. Some websites also use 'tricks' to fool crawlers into thinking they provide information that they don't- there are a bunch of these out there, if you've searched the web I'm sure you've seen some of them- but if an outfit like Google or Yahoo finds out they will ban your website from their searches, and as I understand it they have some fairly sophisticated statistical methods to discover this form of treachery. Crawlers are also used by spammers and other evildoers to search websites looking for email addresses to send spam to for example- they can read all the text on a website, and they're looking for any of those "at signs" that mark an email address. That's why you won't find my email address anywhere in clear text on this website... my email address is set up in a convoluted, mixed up way using JavaScript so that you can click on it to do a 'mailto' or hover over it with your mouse to copy it for emailing me, but an spammer's unsophisticated spider can't make sense out of it- at least not yet. My apologies for that, but I hate spam as much as I hate junk snail mail, just like most folks. You will find many websites set up in a similar fashion, and if you didn't know why before you read this, now you do. It won't be long before the spammers' spiders can figure out how to get around the unsophisticated method I use, I guess then I'll have to use one of the more complex encryption methods for it that can be found out there on the www.
See the Site Map (link below) for a means to post me a message.
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