Article: Crumbling cookies: how are you capturing electronic information?(ONLINE)(significance of cookie files in online data capturing)

Simply sending out an email with a link to your organization's Website can result in a wealth of data--who clicked on the link, how many times the person clicked on it, from where the person clicked, what computer the person was using when clicking on the link. Simply sending out that email can also result in a wealth of, well, wealth.

All this can be made possible using a relatively inconspicuous, and often misunderstood, key or hook on your organization's Web site, that ties the data back to a particular computer and allows you to match sets of data. The industry term is "cookie," and its origins are as mysterious as the tool itself is to most computer users.

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