What actually happens when someone ‘accepts all cookies’?
In: 614
Accepting all cookies means that you are declaring (perhaps falsely) that you understand that from now on, when your browser fetches anything needed for that server’s web pages, your browser quite possibly will allow the servers to track you with “cookies”.
The use of cookies and tracking you *a little bit* is normal and necessary functionality for any “stateful” operations like being “logged in to your account” on a website that you’re only sporadically connecting to.
But cookies are also very heavily exploited for advertising, surreptitious data collection, precisely identifying you, and sharing of your personal information among companies you maybe weren’t expecting to know about your activity on this website.
Even if you do declare that you accept all cookies, you may in fact have configured your browser *not to* accept all cookies (e.g. it’s common to block 3rd-party cookies). Saying you accept all cookies in this situation does not actually make you actually accept all cookies.
But if the website uses cookies at all, it has to ask if you accept them (due to European laws about this), and if you don’t accept them, the website may refuse to let you proceed, because the people running it are unwilling or unable to disable all but the bare minimum of cookies needed for the site to work for you, even though it’s well within their ability to do so.
Latest Answers