What actually happens when someone ‘accepts all cookies’?
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Every shop you visit, the shopkeeper has someone slap a coloured and number sticker on you when you enter.
The next time you come into that shop, with your sticker, the shopkeeper looks up the number and knows what you bought last time, how much you generally spend, all the information they have on you.
Another shop will use different coloured stickers but with the same thing. A unique number on it, that identifies you as their customer #27, and so they know about you from previous visits (even if you never bought anything, or if you said “I’m interested in…” at some point – and the other shops don’t necessarily have that information because you’re #27 to the pink shop, but #437289 to the red shop, and so on). Those interactions are all recorded against your sticker number for each individual shop you go into, even if they never ask your name.
“Accept all cookies” means that you’ll just keep those stickers on you forever, and take any sticker that someone tries to put on you. Some guy walks up to you in the street, you have no dealings with him, he’s not selling anything, but he puts a numbered sticker on you and you just leave it there for years.
“Reject all cookies” is like taking those stickers off regularly or not letting anyone put a sticker on you. The shops “don’t know who you are” unless you tell them. They don’t know your order history, unless you tell them, etc.
“Essential / necessary cookies” means that once you log into Amazon, Amazon will give you a sticker so you don’t have to log in for EVERY SINGLE PAGE. But they won’t just stick things on you randomly or let their corporate partners put stickers on you.
Nowadays, those stickers are most often left by companies that you have no personal dealings with – the strangers in the street. They are monitoring everything, not just that you went into the butcher’s shop, but that you had previously come out of the adult store, and now you’re going to the supermarket, and oh look, you work in that government building, and you regularly spend the night with your best friend’s wife, and SHE has stickers that tell you that she spends a lot of time in lingerie stores, etc. They then sell that information on to other companies for them to try to target your custom. You walk into a shop you’ve never been into before, they look up all your stickers and they say “Ah, yes… hey, if you’re interested, I can sell you a nice bunch of flowers for your wife, because you’ll be at the hotel this Tuesday, won’t you?”
Cookies are just tracking numbers that each site gives you. They are necessary for some things (e.g. staying logged in without having to log in for every single page you visit), but they are also abused, especially by third-parties who just want to join all the information about you from a dozen websites together to build a “customer profile” so they can sell that to someone who will target you for certain products.
“Accept all cookies” allows that to happen.
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