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 cookie is simply a way to hold session information while you browse the web. Most websites are “stateless” which means you might bounce between multiple web servers while you are browsing. If one server gets overloaded you will be moved to another and all that happens without you knowing.
But this means the server can’t really hold your session information (there are ways to do it, and for secure sites there is a copy of your sesssion in a shared area on the servers).
But your browser needs certain information it can send back to the server.
Then there are tracking cookies that give you an unique identifier that gets sent to a tracking site (like Google analytics) which lets them monitor your overall behavior.
The GDPR in Europe said you can’t just track users without telling them which is why you see the prompts now. They need to give you the option to opt out of the tracking cookies while still allowing the session cookies.
Most sites can’t really work without keeping at least some information local so a lot of sites, especially ones you log into can’t really work without at least having a session cookie to prove you are the browser that logged in.
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