Learn how cookies function, how they are used by websites, and the importance of managing them for privacy and security. Cookies are small pieces of data stored by web browsers on a user's device at the request of web servers. They are sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. Cookies allow the server to "remember" specific user information, facilitating functionalities like maintaining user sessions , remembering preferences , and tracking user behavior . Link to heading How Do Cookies Work? Cookies are set by a combination of both the server and browser. First, when the user visits a website, the server can send a Set-Cookie header in its response. "This instructs the browser to save the cookie on the user's device. Once a cookie is stored, the browser includes it as the Cookie header for subsequent requests to the same domain or path. This behavior is configurable through attributes such as SameSite , HttpOnly , and Secure.…