Internet Cookies sound more delicious than a technical thing though they are indeed technical.
Let’s explorer internet cookies and how they work!
What are internet cookies?
Internet cookies identifies you on the internet, and without it the internet will look totally different.
Cookies are more like a drawn image for you according to your browsing behaviour and activities over the internet.
How do cookies work?
Cookies make the internet more personalized to you!
- help websites to remember you and your logins and even what you have added to cart earlier without checkout.
- Store your sessions data through the web browser, saving it on your device as a text file.
Once you revisit a website, the server recalls the data from the cookies to give you a personalized experience, like remembering your logins and actions done on the website before.
How cookies affect your online experience?
Cookies affect your online experience dramatically, either in a benign or harmful way.
Are internet cookies good?
Cookies are good for your online experience as it affect it in many different ways:
- Managing your Sessions: Giving you a better experience by remembering your passwords and logins and your preference for your visited websites.
- Shopping journey Experience: Cookies help with your shopping online by tracking your activities will shopping and remembering what you have added to cart and continue shopping at the same time.
- Advertising tracking: Tracking your online activities, visited websites, visited products to deliver relevant ads to you while browsing the internet.
That is how you find some ads for products you have seen earlier chasing you all over the internet, which we call retargeting.
Are internet cookies dangerous?
To understand how cookies can be harmful, we need to explain that there are two types of the internet cookies:
First party cookies:
Those cookies are created once you have visited any website, it stores your login information and preferences, like the language of a page etc…
Most of the time cookies are safe as long as the visited website is secured!
Third-party cookies:
This type of internet cookies are created once you visite a website and ads show on it, cookies are created by the Ads, not the visited website.
For example, you have visited a website, appeared on it three Ads, you will have three files for cookies created by those Ads.
Third-party cookies
Third-party internet cookies are created by ads or analytics tools, even if you did not click on those ads.
Those third party cookies track your activities to know even your journey before seeing the Ad!
So it will know if you searched for the product before seeing the ads, or even seen the Ad on social media before seeing it on the website, to know how ads on different platforms influence your actions.
Zombie cookies:
Zombies have been able to conquer all the horizons, even the internet! ๐
Originally cookies have and expiry date, and then it will be deleted automatically as the data can be outdated and affect your browsing negatively.
Also, you have the option to accept cookies or reject it, but zombie cookies break all those rules, they are supernatural ๐
Those type of cookies can be persistent, even if you rejected them, they appear on your device.
They can reappear even after deleting them!
Zombie cookies are also known as “flash cookies”, appeared the first time by data stored in the decommissioned Adobe flash storage bin.
Third-party Cookies and zombie cookies can be harmful if created by suspicious websites or service as hackers can influence those cookies to collect data about you.
Now we know that cookies are important for our online browsing to provide a relevant, and personalized experience.
It is also important for the advertising industry and analytics to deliver the right ads and to understand the user journey over the internet.
But do not forget that also it can be harmful if it comes from suspicious websites or compromised websites.
Your privacy on the internet is important!
verify links and websites before clicking them, you can use a tool like WOT to help you with Protecting Your Browsing.
