Would cookies be defined as personal data? If so, can the user deny cookies and still surf the webz without issues?
In: Technology
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.
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