What About the Cookies?

You’ve seen them pop up at the bottom or top of the screen whenever you visit the website. If you’ve bothered to read it, you have a mental idea that the purpose of cookies is to enhance your user experience- or something of the sort. What are the cookies really about?

Tracking Cookies

As mentioned, cookies that come up on your screen are intended to track your activity on a given site. It logs your data and does the same to the individuals who visit the site. When you click on “agree,” it allows the site to save the cookie on your hard drive. In essence, these cookies are a small text file that will then allow future interactions with it to find out what your preferences are.

The reason websites wish for you to agree is so they can create a marketing database. They want to know the preferences of the people visiting their sites so that they can better tailor it for them. For example, if a tech company notices that more people are stopping by their small business IT support page than any other page; they will know that their target market is primarily small business owners. What you’ll notice then is that advertisements of the said service will show up in other areas. The intention of this targeted advertising is to persuade you to buy in, and thus leading to higher conversion rates on their end.

The other side of cookie tracking

While not all, there are sites that go the extra mile. If you’ve ever visited one site, noticed an ad, and then for some reason when you visit other sites the same ad persists, then the said cookie has shared all your personal information across the internet. That is possible when people are signed up for Google ads and other similar services. In essence, they follow you around the internet to convince you to make the buy-in.

For some people, that is not entirely a problem. If you are not into the service or product, you can ignore it entirely. For others, this can feel like a form of stalking by the site you’d visited before you started seeing their ads almost anywhere you go on the internet. For the most part, these cookies are not there for malicious intent. The bottom line is giving you more of what you are interested in by assessing your preferences.

It becomes problematic when your antivirus keeps flagging the same files as viruses and putting them high up on the security risk. Some companies use aggressive cookies, and Facebook included, that end up taking your information that includes your device location, its data, what you’ve previously searched and other personal details you’d rather others not know.

Wrap up

If you’re big on privacy, you have the option of declining. For those who don’t feel that their information getting gathered is not a problem, they can continue agreeing. What’s important is knowing what you’re getting into.