And why do I feel so defensive when it pops up? Lmao I will go out of my way to reject all and I don’t even know what I’m rejecting
In: Technology
If you accept a cookie, the website will track your history on that page and make recommendations for you, or give you personalized ads. If you decline the cookie, it doesn’t.
Cookies are chunks of data that a website saves on your computer.
Rejecting them means the website is told ‘no’ to saving anything. Which means you (usually) can’t log in or change any settings or have the website remember which pages you visit or what you put in your shopping cart (etc).
Accepting them lets the website function as it wants to (and also let data trackers know some data about you, which is usually used for targeted ads and similar profiling).
First of all, we have to make a difference between “necessary” cookies (e.g. a session cookie, or anything really that is needed for the site to work) and other cookies, e.g. a tracking cookie for advertising, or a cookie that helps to measure which pages you visit for analytics, etc.
The cookie that remembers your preference (usually: “necessary cookies only”) is also a “necessary cookie”, so that can be saved without asking…
The cookie banners just allow you to refuse the “non-necessary” ones, i.e. the site still has to work if you refuse but advertising tracking not necessarily. And according to the EU data protection directive, you should be able to refuse all of these with a single click. So in theory it should be easy to just keep the required ones and be good.
In practice, some site owners have found rather *creative* ways of justifying why all these advertising is actually needed for the site and that the advertising cookies are also “required” and if you don’t agree with them, you have to deselect them one by one, using a lot of time. Of course speculating on most users not taking that time and rather letting it slip, while still being able to argue that they “allow” you to deselect them…
But all of that will become less important anyways, as nowadays “segmented cookies” are a thing: if a cookie is “segmented” it means that they will be attached to the main site: let’s say you have [eviladvertiser.com](http://eviladvertiser.com) placing an ad on Reddit – when you visit the page they will set a cookie that allows them to remember that you have been seen on Reddit’s ELI5 sub. Later you go to Facebook, and the same advertiser also places an ad there … so it will look for existing cookies, but it can’t find them, because Reddit and Facebook have different “cookie jars” for third-party cookies, and they can’t look into each other’s jars.
Firefox already treats all third-party cookies as “segmented” since a while, and Google Chrome has already announced that they will roll this out in the beginning of 2025 (though you can already activate it now). With this feature, the user tracking of advertisers will become much, much harder, regardless of your cookie settings.
Alternatively: just set your browser to delete all cookies when you close the program, and then set some exceptions (like Reddit). This is what I’m doing since years, and it effectively blocks tracking from one day to the other.
For the rest, a plugin like “I don’t care about cookies” will always automatically click on the “refuse” button for you, and safe you a lot of clicking.
Oh yes, and use Firefox. Much better privacy than the browser that quite literally comes from an advertising company!
Accepting cookies is basically you telling the site “I’m okay with you remembering things about my time on this site.” If third party cookies are included, then you’re also saying “I’m okay with every embedded website remembering things about my time on this site.”
Rejecting cookies basically means “I don’t want any of you to remember this. Next time I come to this site, treat me like a completely new user.”
You’re given the choice because advertisers were caught using third party cookies to profile users for targeted advertising, and lawmakers decided that they shouldn’t be doing that without those users’ consent. Thus, all websites are required to offer the option to accept or reject cookies. Of course, advertisers had already developed new methods for tracking users, so it didn’t really accomplish much.
If you are just reading a site, you are shooting yourself in the foot by allowing them to track you.
If you are buying something from a site, you prolly need cookies for that to work.
The short and practical answer to this questions is:
If you accept all cookies, the average website will put a cookie on your device for every one of their dozens—if not hundreds—of 3rd party “suppliers”. This allows each and every one of those 3rd parties to build a profile of you around the web, usually for advertisement purposes.
If you reject cookies, the above doesn’t happen: Cookies that are actually necessary (like remembering your session, your shopping cart, etc.) don’t need your consent in the first place.
Websites use cookies to remember you. Which is fine, and very often necessary for the website to work correctly. For example, a website where you login, like Reddit, will use a cookie to remember that you are logged in.
This means that Reddit can track how do you use Reddit.
But the privacy laws say that you have to consent before the website would send the data captured while you browse the website to other companies. For example, to allow Reddit to send your browsing data to Google. And each other site you use might also send data to Google.
In this case, Google has a huge amount of data on you, if they know, in detail, what did you do on every website you visited, and when.
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