Why do almost all websites, when asked about cookies, still have the “required” ones which you can’t disable. What are those?
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I’m not very good at ELI5, but I thought it would be good to add some extra information
As said cookies are used to store data. One thing to note is that most of the web uses HTTP, which does not allow state, or data, to be stored. It either has to be stored on the server or in the browser. In the past you would sometimes see session IDs in the url, but that was horribly insecure. It also depended on the request going to the same server, or else all data would be lost, because the new server doesn’t know about the previous server’s session. Cookies was one way to solve that problem. Now a days we have more options to choose from, but the most common required cookie is going to be one that stores a token for when you log in.
Also cookies can last through multiple requests, where most other data storage would disappear when you reload the page. The other option of local storage can work, but is much less secure than the protocols around cookies.
I will agree with you about news sites and other sites you just víit not necessarily needing cookies, but also for pay wall purposes and such they need them.
tl;dr if you had no cookies the site would think you are a new visitor every time, and cookies are actually pretty secure, when used properly
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