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A cookie is a text file written by your web browser to your disk drive, that keeps the current information about you, and sends it back to the server. It is encoded by domain (such as www.websyte.com) so it is only returned to the same site it came from.
Cookies became a problem when advertising banners, which may be on one page (like newstoday.com) but are served from another domain (like flycast.com) started tracking the pages - so flycast could tell that you visited drudgereport, edmunds.com, amazon.com, and anywhere else that used their banners when you visited. (These sites used as an example, they are not necessarily using that software.)
This meant that the ad banner domain could build up an advertising profile on you - for example, you like independent news reporting, cars, and books. From this capability, consumers began to be wary of cookies and some sites were using cookies as marketing tools.
The software of NALA Campus is written using the Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) model. The cookie is used to preserve a user session variable so that we can sort your data from the hundreds or thousands of other persons using the web site at the same time. Your other information is stored on the web server in a database, which is not publicly accessed.
If you turn off cookies, you can't use the ASP software, and we can't provide the seminars.
As a practical matter, there has to be some way to 'preserve state' in the web conversation so that someone else doesn't get your messages or interaction - and the minimal use of cookies by the ASP-based program is the safest and most secure way.
Theoretically, a site could get information from a cookie on one domain, put it in a database that was shareable between domains, and then combine that information with information from another cookie on another domain that you visit, that they also own. This is not a practice of NALA or Eufrates.com and information from cookies is treated as confidential.
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