Some areas save preferences and other settings as "cookies" on your computer's hard disk when you access the MSN Money Web site (186773)

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What are cookies?

Cookies are pieces of information that a Web site transfers to your computer's hard disk for record-keeping purposes. Cookies can make the Web more useful by storing information about your preferences on a particular Web site, such as your preferred chart settings for MSN Money Investing.

How does MSN Money use cookies?

Cookies store information between pages on a Web site. Sites like MSN Money Investing that are more than simply a collection of static Web pages need to store information like preferences, such as: do you like to see all news headlines or just the latest ones, or have you installed the MSN Money Investing controls or not? If you do not have a cookie to indicate these, MSN Money Investing cannot know if it has been installed properly, and cannot know your preferences for using the site.

MSN Money Investing also uses cookies to identify the most popular areas of the site, so Microsoft can learn which features are most important to people and which need improvement. Microsoft realizes that people will not use a site where their privacy at risk, and so we are committed to ensuring that the privacy of our users is always secure. Microsoft treats this very seriously.

How do cookies work?

A cookie is simply a temporary area of storage that is on your computer. Normal software uses millions of bytes of temporary storage all the time. If you were able to shut it off, no non-Web-based program would be able to function correctly because storage unique to each specific user is required for the rich interfaces that people have come to expect from software. Cookies allow Web sites to begin building complex functionality more akin to that of a normal program by providing this required temporary storage on a per-user basis. Without cookies, the features of the site and your ability to customize them would be greatly limited.

The use of cookies is an industry standard, and many major Web sites use them to provide useful features for their customers. Most browsers are initially set to accept cookies. If you'd prefer, you can set yours to refuse cookies. However, you may not be able to take full advantage of a Web site if you do so. For example, you can only access the subscription services of MSN Money Investing if you accept cookies.