In my years of web browsing, I've grown accustomed to verifying most cookies that are dished up. But I've started noticing quite a few that are similar and was wondering if we could perhaps pool our knowledge to come up with a bit of a list.

I'm aware that programs like Spybot S&D would have these types lists. But I'm curious about the harmless ones, and the libraries and services that people use.

Okay, these are the ones I remember so far:

PHPSESSION : session identifier for PHP.
ASP.NET_Sessionid : session identifier for ASP.NET
__utma, __utmb, __utmc, __utmv : Urchin Tracking Module (I see these a lot)
sc_id, s_sq, s_sess (probably others) : Omniture (I see these a lot, too) - they own 2o7.net, FWIW
BIGipServer* : BigIP load balancer from F5? (I thought they were a network like Akamai)
CP=null* : no idea, yet I see it a lot
he=lo : also no idea
bblastactivity, bblastvisit (probably others) : some sort of bulletin board software
T3CK : no idea. I see this one a fair bit, too.
MintUnique, Mint* : again, I dunno, but I see it from time to time.
WEBTRENDS_ID : I imagine this is probably WebTrends.

Any others?

Wade.

All of the ones I listed come usually come from the hosting site. I've been verifying cookies in my browser for a long time and the repeated cookie names don't come from third-party sites.

I know the __utm* and the s_* cookies are for tracking website usage. The basic way they work is to give you a uniqueID and then see what pages you load from that site with it. This data is used to see which pages are popular, which links are more often followed, how often people come back to the site, and so on. There's more to it than that, of course, but that's the purpose. Of course, there are a lot of people who don't understand that's what those cookies are for, or don't want to be individually tracked, or don't like cookies generally, so such statistics have high error margins. I see a lot of sites use several methods, perhaps for this reason.

Of course, I may be one of the few in IWETHEY who has worked with some of this on the website. That may explain the lack of response so far...

Wade.