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 have been a thing for longer than that.
They first came up in the late 90s.
They are used to web-servers can remember who you are and so they can remember settings etc from page to page.
Without them most of the modern web would not work.
However while this remembering who you are also has privacy implications.
You might be okay with the news website you are visiting remembering that you like to read articles in dark mode and in English and even suggesting articles based on where it things you are and what you like. You might be less okay with the advertisements on the page remembering who you are and recognizing you across many different sites to build up a profile about you.
All this information is very lucrative to collect so the people who own websites and their advertisers would like to collect as much of it as possible.
In many places around the world the local governments didn’t care much about their people’s privacy being attacked like this or if they cared they didn’t have the power to do anything about it.
Certainly the US government wouldn’t side with consumers against big business like that.
However the way the European Union and their parliament and other institutions works means that there are a lot of people in positions of power who do care about that, they are not as beholden to big business and they do represent a large enough market that large corporations can’t just ignore or bully them.
So the EU made a number of laws about protecting people’s rights online.
Those were only applicable to sites that do business in the EU and other countries covered by those laws, but most sites complied and ended up putting up the same sort of protection for everyone just to be save.
They have to ask before they put cookies on your computer now.
Of course most of them make it as hard as possible to say no to that and they hide what their privacy invading data collection cookies are for behind confusing language, so that most people just click “yes” out of annoyance and habit just to make to popup go away.
These popups are when you started noticing cookies. You were using them long before, but not noticing it and you only became aware thanks to becoming collateral damage in the war between the EU and big tech.
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