Should You Accept Cookies on the Internet or not..
As an internet user, you might have seen a pop up to accept or decline cookies as soon as you open a website. While the simple click of a button to accept cookies may seem harmless, the real solution requires a bit more depth. Let’s find out what these are and if you should or should not accept them.
What are Internet Cookies?
The internet “magic cookies” were invented in 1994 by Lou Montulli when he was just a 23-year-old engineer at Netscape, the company that built nternet’s first widely used browsers. He was trying to solve a pressing problem on the early web: websites had lousy memories. Every time you loaded a new page, a website would treat you like a stranger it had never seen before. That made it impossible to build basic web features we take for granted today, like the shopping carts that follow us from page to page across e-commerce sites. Cookies are text files with small pieces of data — like a username and password — that are used to identify your computer when you use a computer network. Specific cookies known as HTTP cookies are used to identify specific users and improve your web browsing experience. When you click on accept, the cookie is exchanged between your computer and the network server, the server reads the ID and knows what information to specifically serve to you.
What happens if you accept the cookies?
In some scenarios, it can be useful for you to accept cookies. To understand why cookies can be helpful, it’s important to understand the data a cookie might contain about you. It can contain information like website name, unique user ID, browsing habits and history, personal preferences and interests, links clicked, time spent on the website and many more. With collecting such data, marketers of the company use cookies to their advantage and, in some cases, to your advantage as well. The first advantage being simple — website access. Without consenting to cookies, you might not be able to access the website. Secondly, cookies improve your user experience by remembering you and tracking your activity which leads to making your experience more personalized. Lastly, easy log-ins. Cookies can remember your log-in credentials so that you do not have to repeatedly log-in or in case you might forget your password. For marketers the use cookies help in determining what their audience’s interests are based on browsing activity, purchases and preferences. This gives them so much data to target their audience with the right messages and strategies.
What happens if you do not accept the cookies?
While you might think accepting cookies won’t hurt your privacy, there are some scenarios where you might not want to accept or keep the cookies. You shouldn’t accept cookies when you’re on an unencrypted website — a site where the lock icon beside the website address is not locked. This can be dangerous as there is no security to protect your data. This can lead to hacking or stealing personal information like credit card details. Not all cookies are the same. If you do not decline Third-party cookies, the website can sell your browsing data to them. Having cookies stored in your browser can slow down your computer speed as they occupy disk space. Antivirus software may flag suspicious cookies, in which case you should not accept them (or you should delete them if you already have). f you’re sharing private data like your Social Security number or banking information, you should decline the use of cookies to keep it safe. This is the type of personally identifiable information that, if intercepted by the wrong parties, could help fraudsters commit online frauds like identity theft.
End of Tracking for Cookies as both user and a marketer —
Since cookies have been proven to be more dangerous than effective for users, Google had announced in early 2022 it would end the support for cookies. But since then google has been pushing the deadline and now it has been pushed to 2024. Google’s Vice President of Privacy Sandbox, Anthony Chavez wrote in a blog post, “The most consistent feedback we’ve received is the need for more time to evaluate and test the new Privacy Sandbox technologies before deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome.” The company also focused the feedback they received from marketers and advertisers that they needed more time to transition to Google’s cookie replacement. This is totally understandable as this helps them deliver the most relevant and targeted content to specific audiences.
As a user, I want to be safe from the world full of hackers and I also absolutely can not survive without the internet. As a marketer, majority of my audience can be on the internet and can help me make my targeting better which eventually leads to giving the user a smoother experience. Companies like Apple had introduced security features for IOS in 2018 to protect they privacy of their users. I personally think that cookies are a great way of making life easier for the user as well as the marketers. If a user really cares about their privacy, they can protect the same by securing it. Hopefully, in the future, there is a way Google can come up with security features for all so that no company has to go to the lengths of introducing their own security system.
