Since their introduction on the Internet, misconceptions about cookies have circulated on the Internet and in the media. In 1998, CIAC, a computer incident response team of the United States Department of Energy, found the security vulnerability "essentially nonexistent" and explained that "information about where you come from and what web pages you visit already exists in a web server's log files". In 2005, Jupiter Research published the results of a survey, according to which a consistent percentage of respondents believed some of the following false claims:


Cookies cannot erase or read information from the user's computer. However, cookies allow for detecting the Web pages viewed by a user on a given site or set of sites. This information can be collected in a "profile" of the user. Some profiles are anonymous, meaning they contain no personal information, yet even such profiles can be controversial.

According to the same survey, a large percentage of Internet users do not know how to delete cookies.
One reason people do not trust the concept of cookies is because some sites have abused the personal identification aspect of cookies and have shared them.
A large percentage of targeted advertising comes from information gleaned from tracking cookies.

Setting a cookie
Personalization
Misconceptions
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