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
Back in the 1990’s, both IE and Netscape would actually inform you [“Hey, this website would like to use a cookie to track you”](https://tfortesting.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/where-cookies-are-used.png) and you would allow or deny. There were two issues:
1. If you denied the cookie, things like basic logging in, the shopping cart, etc. wouldn’t work
2. Lots of people were just hitting “Yes” just to move forward, not really reading what the dialog was saying.
Over time, both browsers decided to allow cookies by default. This became a problem in the 2000’s where every website would start to abuse these cookies to track you even if you weren’t shopping on their site. As all other posters mentioned, GDPR forced websites to actually say “We use cookies, you can decide what they are used for”. In theory, you could configure your browser to give you a pop-up every time a website wants to give you a cookie and you can deny them each time; but you would have to do that for almost every website you visit these days.
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