Cookie Respawning

What Does Cookie Respawning Mean?

Cookie respawning is the process of recreating browser cookies from information in that has been deleted. With cookie respawning, companies can take information stored in flash cookies and use it to recreate a cookie in a browser. There are concerns that cookie respawning can violate a user’s privacy and become problematic for the operation of the computer in the same way that any kind of cookie storage can ultimately challenge an operating system.

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains Cookie Respawning

In recent studies, the use of cookie respawning has been found to be minimal, and companies that have been caught respawning have stopped. A Carnegie Mellon University study in 2010 looked at the use of "Local Shared Objects" (LSO), or "flash cookies," in Adobe Flash, popularly used by Web browsers, and saw that although cookie respawning may not be on the rise, a few fairly large sites did participant in this kind of reconstitution of cookies.

The possibility of cookie respawning is something that the tech community is taking seriously as experts continue to look at how data about Web users is tracked by companies on the Internet.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Latest Cybersecurity Terms

Related Reading

Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…