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About needs cookies enabled to work properly. A lot of the cool stuff we do just won't work without them. Learn how to enable cookies in various popular browsers.
Cookies, as you may or may not know, are nothing more than a mechanism for storing information between pages. For registered users this allows us to provide you with more robust features such as search and click history, search preferences, personal profile information such as home airport and more.
In an application such as About, such knowledge is critical to the basic functionality we provide. You enter some search parameters, click "Search," and a bunch of our servers start working. You then proceed through a series of pages to view and manipulate the results. We need to know that you are the same person from one link to another, so we don't show your results to someone else, or somebody else's results to you.
There are two ways in web applications to keep track of user state. One way is with cookies. Our web site asks your browser to store a random value, a string of essentially meaningless letters and numbers that uniquely identify your session from all the other millions of sessions of our users. Whenever your web browser then contacts our site, it sends up that cookie, so the web site can find your search data and present it to you.
Another way to track sessions is to attach a unique value like this to every single web link or address in our entire site. This is certainly possible, and a number of web sites use this method. We do not use it, because it is much more prone to problems than using cookies; if one little link is forgotten or missed, the user session can be lost, and the site will appear to break.
Many people misinterpret cookies as some kind of nefarious plot on the part of web sites to invade their privacy. While cookies can be used to track user activity to varying levels of specificity, our use of cookies does not let us find out who you are in any identifiable way. That is, unless you register (which is not required), we don't know *who* you really are; just that you are some user out there on the internet.
Let's be very clear, however. About does use cookies to measure and understand how well or poorly our marketing efforts work. Since we don't sell anything to consumers, the only way we make money is through the sponsors that choose to buy advertising on our site. Therefore, it is critical for us to understand the behavior of our users: how many return to the site; how many find us through paid advertising; how many find us on their own. We here at About are decidedly fanatical about privacy policies on the Internet in general, and this is reflected in our privacy policy. Take a look at this policy; if there is anything you find objectionable there, we'd like to hear about it.
