What the title says. I remember, let’s say 10/15 years ago cookies were definitely a thing, but not every website used it. Nowadays you can rarely find a website that doesn’t give you a huge pop-up at visit to tell you you need to accept cookies, and most of these pop-ups cleverly hide the option to reject them/straight up make you deselect every cookie tracker. How come? Why do websites seemingly rely on you accepting their cookies?
In: Technology
A lot of websites are built using common frameworks, web packages if you like.
So once it gets implemented, as soon they update to the package version that has implemented, suddenly you see it everywhere.
There is an obsession with tracking people (I dont do it on any of my sites), and an obsession with requiring javascript for even basic text content sites. The web has gone downhill a lot sadly, (many of my sites are either HTML only or at least work reasonably well with javascript blocked).
Analytics could be done locally with something like awstats, but for some reason external tracker analytics like google analytics became viral.
The majority of cookie prompts I have seen, if you click allow all, it will remember for ages providing you dont wipe the cookies at any point, whilst I have noticed if you select either reject all, or only allow essential cookies, it will conveniently forget in a much shorter time frame, kind of like how on android apps if you use the app in a way the dev doesnt like they will keep nagging you.
The whole thing is even more amusing when you consider many modern sites now days are designed to “forget” out of the box, e.g. various websites I use, will auto log you out if you dont visit for a while, I am curious if those same sites also “forget” any tracking that has been done.
These sites after a lot of debugging seem to use temporary tokens, the tokens will renew if you keep accessing them before they expire, but if they expire they “forget” and usually the expiry is fairly short. When I queried site admins about this behaviour they were saying things like your browser must be wiping cookies, so an example of using a framework they havent written and not understanding how their own tokens work.
I would love us to go back to non animated banner ads that are trackerless. A bit of common sense so e.g. put up PC adverts on a PC tech community, clothing adverts on a fashion community, toy adverts on mumsnet, that sort of thing. Dont need tracking to put up relevant ads.
I also think its past the point of tracking for advertising purposes, so many people just collect data for the sake of it now, as data has some value. Things like requiring an email address to download a free/trial software, or e.g. if you contact a company, you suddenly end up on their mailing list, that sort of thing.
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