That’s the way the cookie crumbles…

For a lot of people, announcing the death of cookies would mean adios to those annoying messages supposedly explaining their use that we accept without understanding, without even reading them: just another nuisance involved in using the web.

But cookies are more than these absurd — and often illegal — warnings placed there as a result of the ineffectiveness of some legislators who are unable to understand that the effect of badly made laws is not to fix the problem they were supposed to fix, but in some cases make them worse. In reality, cookies are a simple, low-cost solution created by Netscape to enable information to be saved between different browsing sessions. Cookies were a small identifier stored in our computers so the browser knew if we had visited that site before and could then link us to things we’d on that page, especially (at that time) we’d stored something in a shopping cart. Cookies do not store our personal information, which is stored in the site’s files.

Cookies soon became ubiquitous to the point that the web can’t be conceived without them. On the one hand, because sites that don’t use them have no idea what’s going on. On the other hand, because they were essential for analytics. And finally, because they made it possible to know which sites we’ve visited or which advertisements we’ve seen. Advertising led to abuses, privacy…