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
Cookies weren’t originally used for as targeting, but that is what it has become. Cookies are just a term for data that’s stored in the users device. Any local information that’s temporary is typically a cookie, think shopping carts on websites, your recently viewed items (possibly) or other information that isn’t long term.
Your account information is stored in the company’s database, but your current shopping carts items aren’t, they’re on your computer.
The way that ad companies use cookies is by keeping track of which websites you’ve been on, what products you observe, what time of day you shop, etc etc. This is saved locally (cookies) and websites (if agreed) can read/write from other websites local storage.
Larger websites like Facebook / YouTube / whatever also sell your data. It’s not just that they have an agreement and allow companies to look at users cookies, they extract all the data, save it on their storage, and sell it to advertising companies. They have so much data and control most of the traffic on the internet that their business model entirely surrounds this and these companies main source of revenue is through advertising. They may not sell the data, but rather claim that they can target ads to consumers better than other websites (which is true). They certainly abuse your data and habits but may not necessarily sell it to the highest bidder. Long term, they want to have control of all the data since that is where all the money is.
In the early/mid 2000s I believe Walmart or Target (or some large department store) started giving baby item coupons to a family’s house. It was a family with a teenage daughter and the parents weren’t trying to have children at all. It turns out that Target determined that the spending habits align with someone who is pregnant, and Target predicted that someone in the household was pregnant. Target found out that the teenage daughter was pregnant before either parent did. That was in the early 2000s, imagine how far as targeting / data collection has come nowadays. They can probably predict your menstrual cycle to the minute.
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