In PictureView, there are only two types of cookies:

1) The Personal Group List. The PGL is a list of your favorite groups that you create and that you save on your own hard drive. PictureView does not keep track of what groups you visit nor do we store your favorite groups on site.

2) Temporary security cookies.

These cookies act as temporary permission tickets and do two things.

1) A large number of customers from AOL, Germany, and Australia had isp's that had enabled some kind of ip address rotation, thereby creating multiple user violations for them to the point where they could not stay logged onto our service. The cookie is a temporary cookie (not saved to hard drive) and acts as a permission ticket so that members whose ip addresses rotate, or those who are dropped by their isps and have to log on again won't be locked out as long as they are on the same computer.

2) Security. The hacker sites had made a sufficient impact on our bandwidth where we had to implement an improved security system in order to prevent large numbers of people from stealing paying member's bandwidth by logging on using guessed or traded passwords. Once implemented there was an immediate increase in available bandwith.

You can accept the cookies and enjoy the added protection and personal group lists, or you can deny the cookies and set your browser to ignore the request. As long as you are using MSIE 4.01 or Netscape 4 or any other browser that allows you to switch off the warning, you will not be reminded that you are denying/not accepting the cookie. (note netscape 3.x does not ignore requests very well)

NOTE: Our cookies do not request or receive any information from you or your computer other than information actually sent to your computer in the form of the cookie (a personal group list or a temporary permission ticket). As far as we know, there is no way that we can make a cookie that would take information from you or your computer. Note the we do not use cookies for tracking how many times you visit, how often you visit etc...