I don’t believe there is a single website or app that has ever asked me for my cookie settings and then never asked again. This is not down to whether I am using a VPN or not as I have only recently began using one on all devices. Why do I constantly need to re-enter them?
When I say app, it is primarily a link through the Facebook app but a page I have visited before.
In: Technology
Cookies are used by the browser. They can be returned by the server, but ultimately their storage and whether they are presented to the particular website is the responsibility of the browser which it turn are influenced by user / security settings.
Your browser saves cookies, not the website.
The browser implemented in the Facebook app seemingly doesn’t save cookies for some reason.
It’s all kind of funky and could depend on a lot of things.
One of the obvious answers is if you “reject all cookies”, a malicious way to comply with that is not to save that preference in a cookie. They’ll argue that since you asked them to save no cookies, they complied, but the price is you have to answer the question more.
Less obvious is that cookies have an expiration date. So part of compliance is maybe they save a cookie that stores your answer, but they set it to expire in 24 hours. That way if you don’t come back again and you’re the kind of person who checks your cookies frequently, you will be less likely to find their “don’t bug me” cookie and accuse them of storing things against your wishes. Not everybody who checks cookies is smart enough to understand this.
The next link in the chain is your browser. When apps open a window, depending on your OS that may actually engage something kind of like incognito mode. The thought is if every app is able to open that browser *and* have access to things like its cookies, App A could sniff around for cookies from App B and use that to get around OS restrictions about how apps can communicate with each other. So to combat that, every time that window opens it only stores “session” cookies that are deleted when the window closes. The consequence is, like above, any cookie that stores your answer to the question ALSO gets deleted.
So if it’s the last case, the only way around it is to try to reconfigure Facebook/your phone to open links in your phone’s preferred browser instead of within the app itself.
That can be annoying, too. For example, in GMail, there is a dialog that asks where I want to open it. I only want to open things in Safari, my phone’s browser. But because Google wants me to use Chrome, no matter how many times I tap the “Remember my preference” switch, it asks me every time *just in case* this time I’d like to install Chrome.
>When I say app, it is primarily a link through the Facebook app but a page I have visited before.
are you using an iphone or ipad?
if i’m not mistaken, on top of the responses other folks have given, apple in particular *does not share cookies* between browser and the in-app browser (“webview”) that apps may use. in particular, iiuc, the way an app uses that in-app browser can also determine whether or not cookies are shared *even within the app*. you are better off jumping out of the in-app browser view and into safari or whatever browser you use in these situations.
A possible cause is that your browser is not allowing cookies to be created. Cookies are local state for a website in the browser’s database. Just a file on disk, usually. But browsers have settings to disable cookie creation.
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