Your cookies

Cookies came about with the World Wide Web and graphical user interface browsers. Essentially a small amount of data placed in your device by a web server whenever you visit a web page. he purpose of cookies is to personalizez the web pages you visit (advertisements, automatically log you in “welcome back Eduardo” or preilling a data field with your data. hey do so by collecting data of what you do on the particularly website and other information stored for your convenience such as login and passwords, account numbers by clicking on a box “Remember me”. So far, so good, because websites can only read the cookies they plant.

 

There are several kinds of “foreign” cookies placed by other parties – advertisers, collectors of statistical data. Tracking cookies are placed by a third-party website, often advertising. These cookies may contain information fed to it from the webpage visited such as the name of the site, particular items viewed, pages visited, etc.

 

When you later visit another site containing an embedded advert from the same third-party site, the advertiser will be able to read the cookie and use it to know more about your browsing history. This allows them to place adverts specific to you.

 

Why is this an issue?

Many people see tracking cookies as an invasion of privacy since they allow an advertiser to build up profiles without the consent or knowledge of the individual concerned. This highlights the differences in legal systems concerning the protection of personally identifiable information. In Europe there is a European Directive that has been adopted into national law.

 

In Europe, each website must state that it will be using cookies and that by agreeing you have given the site implied consent. If such consent is not given some of the website functionality will not work.

 

Elsewhere there is widespread use of privacy policies often written by lawyers. These are complex and detailed statements of how an entity collects, uses, discloses and manages personally identifiable information. Many, but not all websites have a privacy policy. Most people cannot be bothered to look at them in the belief that they have nothing to hide.

While smartphones do not use cookies, there are products for mobile marketers to track users across devices whenever you synchronise your mobile device and your computer’s cookies.

 

What you should do about it

Verify that the website you visit has an explicit Privacy Policy and read it (or at least try to), then find answers to the following questions:

 

• Does the website have privacy settings? If so use them and be ungenerous – some websites frequently change their privacy pract
• Do you know who has planted cookies in your machine and how many there are?
• Would you be surprised if the majority are from places you never heard of?
• Do you know how to delete the cookies in your devices?
• Do you know that you can block and delete cookies in your browser – but it is prudent to find out what the consequences might be before doing The author does both regularly without adverse effects – useful cookies are retained.