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.
OP’s question makes me wonder how old they are. Cookies have been around forever they just didn’t tell you about them. I remember surfing the web in 1996-esque at a museum that was explaining the web. I was on Netscape 1.0 or 2.0. Back then I knew a few domains like Yahoo but you just entered [word you knew].com to see what happened. The museum had it set so you were notified about cookies. I remember asking my parents WTF I’m getting a pop up every time they want to store a cookie. I was too young to understand my parents’ explanation but it was annoying to me but I knew to hit YES.
Cookies have been around since forever. Ad networks like DoubleClick were around in the 90s—I still remember my parents talking about that stock and other Dot Com stocks going through the roof. Maybe the quality of data and the amount of data they had was limited because the internet wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today especially with personal devices, but you can bet ads, targeted ads, etc were a thing.
The person who came up with the cookies display law should be shot out of a cannon into a brick wall. Fucking annoying as all hell. Also, no matter how often I accept cookies, THEY NEVER REMEMBER AND ASK AGAIN.
everyone wants to make money. they’re trying to do that by selling your visiting patterns to advertisers
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.
They offer information that you get for free. The least that they want is to tell Google that you went to their website so that they can get a few cents out of it cause you saw an ad.
Sometimes they want to track the things that you like. So that they will show you the things that you like the next time you visit. That way you will visit them more frequently.
A lot of companies also likes to know what people are often looking for so that they can focus on manufacturing those instead.
Information on what people wants is extremely valuable.
The cookie law is ridiculous and a perfect example of politicians passing laws without having the slightest idea what they’re doing.
Almost every site is going to have cookies, or use local storage, or have some kind of analytics persistence.
For people to have to worry about clicking a useless banner is an absolute waste of time and just confuses people.
They don’t rely on you accepting cookies. They just really want you to accept them so they can track every little thing about you, but the GDPR forced them to be more “transparent” about this desire. Many websites were happily using cookies to track you before the GDPR legislation came in.
This is more of a client problem.
Google loves tracking everyone and owns the biggest browser frame used for chrome and most browsers except Firefox and Safari.
They want cookies and will make it very hard to disable or eliminate. Just one more way you can be tracked, so they can milk you for ad profits.
At one point they used to make money by showing you ads. They do that still but they also try to mine data about you and sell that. There are hundreds of companies that provide this service to websites and these sites tend to use a lot of them. Over time this has ballooned so much that we now see literally hundred or more easily per site
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