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How Cookies Work on Website

Brand names like Urban or Pacsun just saved a cookie onto my browser then there's a string of letters and numbers that form a unique ID to help the site remember me which is surprisingly creepy. The sites you visit do this too, that's what all those pop-ups are telling you. Cookies actually make our online world possible. But they also allow jeans to follow us around the internet. That is because cookies enable companies to band together to track and remember everything we do online. And they’ve become the center of a war of our personal data. Imagine everytime you add something to your cart and click away It disappears or each time you load a new page on facebook. You have to log in again. The website is like talking to Dory on finding Nemo. The Dory Analogy is apparent here.




Dory Suffers from memory lost and websites usually do that. However Cookies solved that problem. In particular if you were looking for a set of blue suede shoes. With each new click, the site recognizes the Unique ID from the cookie stored on your browser and retains that information like what You put into your cart but also your location. What else you click on how much time you spend there, also the details you're giving it. As you browse through the site or even leave the cookies that they added to your browser will tell them that you're the same visitor, not a different one. Over the last 20 years, they've allowed us to live more of our lives online.It was a great feeling to see people create things that we had never thought of. However one of those things was a way to track us whenever we went next like a news website or social media, That samne year when Lou Invented cookies, the first digital banner ad. Today our online world is run by ads.



The buyers in this system are brands that want to sell products by placing ads in front of people who might purchase them. Then you have platforms and publishers with Audiences of people to show ads to, And then you have platforms and publishers with audiences of people to show ads to. In between, you have middlemen dedicated to making sure the ads from the brands are delivered to the right people. A huge amount of information they can use to target ads to you. All these companies are incentivized to gather as much information about your online behavior as much as possible. It was designed to place and retrieve the site you were on. So these companies are also incentivized to collaborate. I took another look at the list of cookies that the shoe store gave me. There's one called “fbp” That's for Facebook, which also owns instagram. What It was'nt anticipated from the cookies in 2994 is that websites would eventually be full of elements hosted by third parties and those elements can save their own cookies on your browser. Those cookies are created by the domain of the third party who can access the data from the site you're on. However every site you visit that uses those same third party elements. That is tracking, it transformed our online world from one in which hundreds of companies knew a small amount about your online behavior. To one in which just a few companies can know it all. Right now, this map of activity is mostly used to serve your personalized ads. But once its collected there's no getting it back.


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