I’m often asked about cookies; we’re prompted to accept cookies on almost every website now, so it’s something that cannot be avoided and can worry users if you don’t fully understand them. I hope this month’s article will help you make sense of what cookies are.
The term cookie comes from the Hansel and Gretel story where the children used cookie crumbs to find their way home. A computer cookie is a small piece of text that a website stores on your computer to know you’ve visited before. Cookies do not normally store personal information about you so they are mostly safe to accept, and clearing your cookies regularly can give you a poor experience online.
On the BBC website you can change the size of the fonts, the site will store a cookie to say that you prefer a smaller or larger font, and it will remember this for your next visit. This ‘functionality’ cookie is quite safe and even desirable.
If you sign into a website like Amazon the website writes a cookie on your computer to say you have passed the login test. When you then visit another page in the same site, this cookie is viewed to know that you’re a logged-in user. Without these functionality cookies you couldn’t login.
The more nosey cookies are known as ‘tracking’ cookies. If you were to visit a shopping site such as Argos and look at a vacuum cleaner, they might write a tracking cookie onto your computer. If you then visit the Amazon site they might read this cookie and display an advert for vacuum cleaners. This is pretty useful if you’re looking for a vacuum cleaner, but can be a little embarrassing if you were to look for ladies underwear, and every website you visit henceforth displays an advert for lingerie.
There are some cookies that have more sinister intentions and act as part of a network of sites. They use as many websites as possible to build a picture of your buying habits and then advertise products straight to you, in some cases using phone or email to follow-up on buying enquiries. This is known as ‘remarketing’ cookies.
In 2018 it became European law that all websites using anything but the most basic functionality cookies must notify the user and gain their consent. This has meant that any websites with users in the EU have to hit their visitors with an ugly cookie message, changing the aesthetics of a site but it also causes some users unnecessary worry about using a website. A very undesirable side effect of this is law is that some American and non-EU websites have simply blocked access to EU visitors as they don’t wish to conform to the law and give away their cookie policies. One news blog suggests this is as high as 25% of US websites.
Our advice is to not worry about cookies and certainly don’t manually clean them from your computer unless you’re about to commit a crime, in which case try to use someone else’s computer!