Do you accept cookies?

My son asked me why he never got cookies when there are many companies offering it while he is using the internet (LOL). I had to explain him what those cookies were, but how about you? Do you understand what happens when you accept or deny it?

Differently to what my son would expect, no one will handle you food, and accepting cookies may not be so harmless as most of us would imagine.

When you accept cookies do you give a permission for the website to track everything you do on the website and sometimes outside of it, besides, many of those companies do sell these notes to other companies so they can know what you like, what you buy, what products you are interested in, where do you live, if you have children, etc. Those cookies get installed in your computer and they follow you, on all websites you go.

This can be much more intrusive than you think, each page that you accept their cookies, they will register how many times you have searched for a product, when did you buy it, which other products have you looked the details, if you connected your Facebook or Google account to it they may even have a picture of you. Imagine how uncomfortable you would be if someone did that to you on the grocery store or any place in the offline world.

So, what happens if you decide to not accept their cookies?

It really depends on the website, but most of them would keep minimal information about you, and if you clean the cookies folder often they would not have enough information about you to suggest you new products based on previous navigations.

There are also different categories of cookies, the ones I hate the most are the Marketing ones, because those are usually shared with other companies, so imagine they are making profit out of the notes they make about your browsing habits.

As a person who works on the tech industry for several years, I use this data all the time, but I agree this is a big privacy issue. But the industry is so crazy, that when Apple and European Government started taking action to prevent this kind of abuse there were many people angry about it !

Companies are now required to ask you if you agree to be tracked or not but I know that many people like my son don't know what this means and what will happen next.

I am planning a series of articles to read some of the privacy policies from some websites so you can really understand how companies know so much about us even if we never go to their physical stores.

How about you? Do you accept or reject cookies? Tell me on the comments below