If you recall, we talked about small text files called cookies that websites will leave on your machine to track you, or remember you, or serve ads to you, or a host of other tasks. Now, to feed in to the hysteria about government spying, it appears that the NSA and GCHQ (Britain’s version of the NSA) have been using those cookies to monitor those individuals that were already under suspicion.

Remember, cookies can be very useful; they are used to remember who you are when you visit websites and serve up relevant ads. They are also benign in and of themselves, text files are not natively harmful. But they do contain a lot of information about you and your behavior, and that is very valuable to, well, everyone. Also, if you’re being good, then nothing to worry about, right?

Right?

If you’re interested in seeing some of your cookies (or ‘Temporary Internet Files’ as IE likes to call them) in Windows you can navigate to the Temporary Internet Files folder on your hard drive, although the options menu in most browsers should give you a view of the ones you have. Here is the folder showing a few of mine, and it shows what your path would be, without the ‘Darren’ of course. There are other files in there, but the image is an example of what cookies look like – and they are *all* from sites that serve up advertising!