In the last year, "cookies" have become an increasing topic of discussion in the online world. A cookie is a small piece of information written to the hard drive of an Internet user when he or she visits a website that offers cookies. Cookie files are extremely small, comprising no more than 255 characters and 4k of disk space (Christle). Cookies can contain a variety of information, including the name of the website that issued them, where on the site the user visited, passwords, and even user names and credit card numbers that have been supplied via forms (Dyrli, 20). Cookies are supposedly only retrievable by the site which issued them, and link the information gathered to a unique ID number assigned to the cookie "so that...information is available from one session to another." (Sullivan).