what exactly do cookies do and what happens if I deny the cookie pop up spam on websites?
In: Mathematics
Cookies are containers of state information that your browser sends along with every request to the origin (i.e., website) they’re associated with. They’re both set by and sent back to servers when your browser interacts with them.
This state can contain any kind of data, but most frequently they’re used to store identity and authentication data bound to a particular session your browser has with the server.
This is because HTTP, the protocol which browsers use to talk to servers is a stateless protocol. Without cookies or some other way of persisting state across requests, each time you visit a site it wouldn’t know who you are. Cookies allow the back-and-forth exchanges between browsers and servers that take place across time to be stateful, giving rise to a logical session between a browser and some service.
If you disabled cookies outright, most websites except the simplest static websites would break. Talk of “disabling cookies” though, is mostly referring to disabling third-party cookies, which is a separate feature of cookies and the browser cookie model.
Third-party cookies are when sites embed frames of third-party origins. The embedded frame and third-party origin has its own cookies and can therefore set and persist state across time. When the same frame is embedded across multiple sites, the third-party service provider can link and associate your browsing behavior across the multiple sites that embed it.
This is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. First party service providers do have a need of analytics and even targeted advertising, which 3p cookies facilitate. 3p cookies have other uses too. Often poorly designed SSO or federated authentication protocols involve 3p cookies.
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