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Friday, November 29, 2024

Internet Cookies - Not the Edible Ones

Cookies are bite-sized pieces of data that websites use to capture information about your online activity.

  • Browser and device-specific i.e. cookies collected by Chrome cannot be used by Firefox on the same computer
  • Different types of cookies
    • Session Cookies - Transient and stored temporarily and erased when you close the browser
    • Authentication Cookies - Most common types - used by web servers to know whether a user is logged in or not and to what account.
    • Persistent / Permanent cookies - Expire at a specific date or after a specific length of time. As long as the cookie lives, information is transmitted when the user visits the website. Also meant for tracking and are called tracking cookies. Advertisers use them to record browsing habits of the users
    • Third-Party cookies
      • Most cookies are associated with the website or domain you are visiting. These are 1st party cookies
      • 3rd party cookies belong to a different domain, often used for advertising and marketing purposes. 
      • These cookies appear when web pages feature content from external sites for advertising
      • Advertisers use these cookies and the browser's browsing history to serve relevant marketing and advertising material.
Cookies in the context of GDPR
  • Cookie banners inform users about what data is being collected about them and how it's being used, giving them control over what data they consent to be collected by organizations.
  • These banners appear before the EU ruled that cookies were breaching user privacy by collecting data without permission

Few gotchas about cookies:
  • Cookies cannot log your keystrokes
  • Session cookies also called transient cookies

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