How-To Geek

Hi,

there is something that I have been curious about for quite a while. When Iog onto most websites that I have an account with, they immediately know it is me logging on. I will type the first letter of my login name or my email address, and they will fill in the rest including my password. And I always assumed that they were able to do this because of cookies on my hard drive. However when I run SuperAntispyware software, it erases all of the cookies that it can find. And sometimes I will run Ccleaner and remove the cookies. But after doing that, certain websites still know that it is me when I log in. How do they do that, are they reading my MAC address or something?

Thanks!

-cinque8

Type SHELL:COOKIES into the start/search field and hit Enter. There you see all your cookies (apart from the tracking cookies).

If I could, let me ask a similar question. I just tried to log into a site that I visit frequently, but I got a message that said:

"We do not recognize this computer",

and then asked me a couple of security questions to make sure it was me. My question is what was it that they didn't recognize on my computer?

Thanks!

Actually cookies are used by most sites to store your account info, such as login info, incuding this one. Block the cookie, or delete it, and the site suddenly "forgets" who you are. Those are not the cookies SAS reports. SAS goes off on supercookies, so called because they bypass the normal path for cookies and get planted on your computer other than in your cookie folder. Supercookies usually are for tracking purposes only. Occasionally, they spy a little deeper than just your tracking history. IMDb is one site that puts supercookies on your computer. I stopped using that site when they started using supercookies.