Why do almost all websites, when asked about cookies, still have the “required” ones which you can’t disable. What are those?

Question

Why do almost all websites, when asked about cookies, still have the “required” ones which you can’t disable. What are those?

In: Other

Answer 1

Essential cookies are how pages work.

For example, if you log in, it stores a small file (session token) that says that you’re authenticated. So each time you access content only available to registered users, computer just checks if you have active cookie (they expire over time). Otherwise, you’d need to log in on every time you move to different page and send instant message or make a forum post or whatever. Even reading my post, Reddit, before rendering it on your screen, checked if you’re logged in or not (via cookie), so it could add “save” and “reply” buttons under it. Without cookie, it wouldn’t know if you’d have those rights – non users can’t reply!.

There’s some other things cookies store as well. For example, internet store might save your location to calculate shipping costs for every product and so on.

More complex explanation would be that (most) websites (nowadays) are programs, not simply instructions to draw something on the screen (HTML), as it was when internet was simple. There’s either one or two programs (back end and front end), meaning something can run on server (not needed for simpler websites) and something almost definitely runs in your computer. And any software usually lies on local storage. But since internet is dangerous, local and remote storage (can a website save extra or generated stuff on the server or your machine) is highly regulated. That’s why they made you confirm that you accept cookies in the first place.

Early internet was more was more similar to text or Word files – just images and text (“static”). But from modern internet, we expect to be able to interact with it, not just request content from a server, but send our data to other end as well. And any sort of data interactivity pretty much means that you’ve moved from simple (viewable) document to an actual application with an user interface. That’s what gave birth to cookies.