— Son, why do websites keep showing me some kind of cookie thing all the time?
— Mom, that's how the site is trying to remember you. Look, I'll give you an example. Imagine that you always go to the same restaurant, where you order your favorite dishes: caesar salad, duck breast and a glass of red wine.
— White, please!
— Great, and a glass of white white. You don't want to ask for the same thing every time, so the restaurant gives you a little note. Now you just show up, and you give the note to the waiter. And voila, 15 minutes later, you have everything you'd ordinarily order on your table.
— Why don't I just say my last name?
— Well, it's not safe. It's not like it says who you are on a piece of paper. It says what you like.
If we go back from the restaurant to our internet world, cookies save your settings. For example, if you go to read the news and don't really like news about politics, the site recognizes you and will offer less such news.
— I thought it was also about advertising.
— It's about advertising too. Cookies store information about the pages you visit. As a result, the internet recommends relevant ads to you. Are you looking at shoe sites? You'll see ads for shoes!
— Let's say. Then why do I still see those annoying cookie windows?
— You'll see them if you're visiting the site for the first time. The site will ask: “Do you want to accept cookies”? If you say yes, a file (your preference sheet) will be created on your computer. If you refuse, it will not be created.
— And next time the site will ask me again?
— That's right! And cookies also “expired”. After some time, the files are cleared, and the window will show again.
— All right. Then why are cookies being fought against?
That's not an easy question, but I'll try to explain. Look, there are several kinds of cookies. We've talked to you about proprietary cookies. For example, you want to go to bestshoes.com, and the site stores a cookie on your computer with your preferences. It's safe here — your data only concerns this site.
But there are also so-called third-party cookies. They are created not on the site you are on, but on third-party resources whose advertising is embedded in the pages you view. Third-party cookies allow advertisers and analytics companies to analyze user behavior on sites with their advertisements.
— I don't really get it.
— Well, imagine that in a restaurant you give a sheet with your preferences for dinner not to the waiter, but ask someone who is walking towards the waiter to hand it to you. He peeks over there, then looks at you. And when you leave the restaurant, a man on the street comes up to you and says: “Actually, white wine tastes better in my restaurant. Shall we go to my place?”
— Sounds creepy!
— It is. Many browsers are already dropping support for them. For example, Google claims that Chrome browser support for third-party cookies will completely stop in 2024. Many sites do just fine and remember your settings without third-party cookies. But there are worse things to come....
— Oh, my God, what else?
— There are zombie cookies! These are third-party cookies that are “burned” into your device. They have a unique ability to recover from being “deleted”. They are also called flash cookies or super cookies, and are very difficult to get rid of. Like other third-party cookies, zombie cookies are a tool of analytics companies that monitor individual users' behavior on the Web. With the help of zombies, some websites block users.
And then there's all sorts of weird stuff. For example, attackers can steal cookies or spoof websites to gain access to your cookies. But it's easy to protect yourself from this if you don't go to dubious sites. For example, if you see http instead of https in the address bar, turn on incognito mode in your browser. No cookies will be created with it.
— All right, what's that all about, anyway? What do they look like?
— They're just text files. You can even open them up and see what's in them.
In general, the bigger and more popular a site is, the more different cookies it stores. I'd show you my pornhub cookies, but I'm shy.
— It's okay, it's okay. Why are these files called cookies anyway?
— Oh, that's very interesting, mom. I even wrote an article about it! Read it!
