HTTP cookies, also known as web cookies or browser cookies, are small data files sent by a server to a user's web browser to maintain session state and personalize user experiences on websites. These cookies are crucial for remembering user preferences and activities in a stateless HTTP protocol, allowing for the management of sessions, personalization, and user tracking. There are various types of cookies, including session, persistent, first-party, and third-party cookies, each serving different purposes like maintaining login sessions or tracking user behavior for analytics and advertising. While cookies are a straightforward method to manage session states and share data between pages, they also pose privacy and security risks and can be deleted by users. In web scraping, cookies are essential for mimicking human browsing behavior to avoid detection by anti-scraping technologies, and tools like Bright Data’s Web Scraper API can manage cookies to facilitate data extraction while bypassing such defenses.