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
The World Wide Web basically has no memory of your actions. Each click or action sends a message to the server that grabs info at that moment and sends it to you. None of the transaction details are getting stored.
So this is a big problem when you are making transactions on the web. The state of the transaction has to be stored somewhere. That’s what cookies are for. They store those transaction details on your computer instead of on the server you are communicating to.
When you end the transaction, then it reads the cookies and finishes the transaction and that gets stored in server software.
Sadly we can also use cookies to store details about the user that have nothing to do with the transaction and other software can then scrape those cookies for that data.
Maybe better would be to require that all cookies be deleted upon end of transaction but that has lots of problems, too.
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