The whole system of web browsing and web servers was designed to be “stateless”: each page load is disconnected from each other. Cookies were invented in the very early days to serve as a kind of breadcrumb (or cookie crumb). When you log in to a website, the primary method of preserving state—of keeping an active session in which you’re remembered from page to page—is dropping a cookie to your browser that your browser in turn sends back every time it requests a page. Thus is the web crudely knit together. (With web apps, even though you’re on what appears to be a single page, all the behind-the-scenes interaction still sends cookies.)
One Macworld reader finds themselves constantly prompted in Safari to log in again when they visit any site, and they’re unclear why. I suspect an excess of privacy—or maybe just the right amount—is bedeviling them. One of the following scenarios is likely.
