Would cookies be defined as personal data? If so, can the user deny cookies and still surf the webz without issues?
In: Technology
Storing tiny bits of information on your computer via your browser of choice, then scanning for these bits to determine what you should see next.
You can deny all cookies and still use the web, but it won’t be as convenient to use. When you tick the “remember me” box on a login page, that information is stored in a cookie, so without cookies you’d have to log in to every site every time.
Cookies are one way that a website can use to offload some storage onto a user. This can be incredibly useful — for example, if you have a website you use daily, you can habitually close the browser tab for a day or two between sessions and the next time you navigate to the site you’ll still be logged in. The website hasn’t “remembered” your session, the website gave you a cookie that’s essentially a “I was just here a few days ago, please log me in” pass, and your browser hands the website that cookie when you connect to it. That’s all a cookie is, it’s just a piece of data that the server sends to your browser, and your browser by default will dutifully send it back every time you revisit the website until the cookie expires.
The way a tracking cookie works is primarily only notable for extremely large corporations like Google and Facebook. They offer services to other websites, usually for free, that help make hosting that website easier. If you’ve ever seen a “log in with Google/Facebook”, that’s one example. They do this, and in exchange, Google and Facebook now have bits of them embedded into a HUGE chunk of the web. It’s hard to visit a popular website these days that doesn’t have at least one of these players wormed into them.
What Google and Facebook then do is give your browser a cookie that’s essentially just an ID card. Every time you connect to a website that has one of these embedded bits, your browser will “phone home” to them and present your ID cookie. Instantly, that company now knows that your ID visited the page you’re looking at.
Collect enough page hits from enough users and you can get a pretty good idea of what people are into.
Imagine your parents are tracking your iPhone location. While you’re moving around freely, they know where you are. Your mom can look and see you’re at the park. Because your mom knows you’re at the park she sends you a photo of a squirrel with the caption “deez nutz”.
You’ve received the text but all you can say is OK. You can delete the text, but you can’t un-receive it.
You = you.
iPhone tracker = cookies.
Squirrel = ad.
Your response “Ok” to your mom = cookie banners (they usually don’t do anything)
As for the second question, no, not really. Sites also use cookies to allow them to remember where you’ve been and your preferences, so without them, you can’t store any of that stuff either. So, for instance, the list of channels you’ve set up on your favourite TV listings website will only work due to cookies.
Theres a very [good explanation of this from a harvard proffessor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw) who studies that for a living.
They use things like what they call “data exhaust” in their algorithms.
Cookies are not always tracking related which is why they differ between tracking cookies and functional cookies. The basic idea is this:
A website needs to talk to 1000 users. And depending on who they identify as (for example login in) they can have their own room.
But the website can’t know who is who because it cannot save data of all the thousand people. So it cannot know who is in their room (logged in) and who is outside. Instead it gives the people a piece with identifying info and their current status. This is a cookie. The users now save that piece locally and send it back in everytime they request another part of the website in order to identify themselves and tell the website at what status they are so that it can react accordingly. This is what makes states (these could be recent searches too) on websites even possible.
But cookies can also save all kinds of info about the User. And depending of what cookies you’ve accumulated you might get ads that are customized to your behavior location and searches.
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