About Cookies
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YOUR BROWSER MUST HAVE COOKIES ENABLED IN ORDER FOR THE PAYPAL SHOPPING CART TO WORK PROPERLY.
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Cookies: What they are and how they work.
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A cookie is a file on a web user's hard drive (it's kept in one of the subdirectories under the browser file directory). This is useful for having your browser remember some specific information which the web server can later retrieve.
For example, when you browse through an "online shopping mall" and add items to your "shopping cart" as you browse, a list of the items you've picked up is stored by your browser so that you can pay for all of the items at once when you're finished shopping. It's much more efficient for each browser to keep track of information like this than to expect the web server to have to remember who bought what, especially if there are thousands of people using it the web server at a time.

A cookie file is NOT a secret way for a web server to find out everything about you and what you have on your hard drive. The ONLY way that any private information could be in your cookie file would be if you personally gave that information to a web server in the first place and it decided to put that information into your cookie file for some reason. Also, each cookie is marked with information about what web server it's for; Netscape Navigator does not send any cookies to any web server they're not for. There is absolutely no way for a web server to get access to any private information about you or your system through cookies. Also, there is no possible way that a virus could be spread through the use of cookies.