What Are Cookies?

Cookies are not new to internet users. You find them on every website you
open and either accept/decline them or keep popping up. Cookies are
small or text files sent to your web or mobile device browsers when visiting
websites.

Web retailers use cookies to track your activities and record basic
information about you. When you use your browser to access a web page
and accept the cookies, your entire activity will be tracked. For instance,
cookies will track what item you added to your cart, your location or zip
code to a shipping site, the products you have purchased in the past,
among other data.

What Are Cookies?

Cookies are ‘harmless’ text files containing small data and are used to
identify your computer whenever you access the internet. When you visit a
webpage, it sends you a cookie and requests your permission. You usually
do not check the details and either accept or decline. When you accept,
you have given the webpage the permission to track your online activities
and deduce basic information about you. This information will make
suggestions for you on subsequent web page visits.

Cookies enable websites to remember you, provide personalized
information or content, and help save your login details. Web developers
use cookies to give you more personal content and ensure you get what
you need on the internet at ease. For instance, if you have used your
location on the web page in the past and tomorrow, you are searching for a
Pizza store, the cookies will filter the internet and show you pizza stores
near your location.

Cookies are exchanged between your computer and the network server, an
integral technology supporting the modern online browsing experience.
Once you accept the cookies, the network server will read the ID and know
what information to serve you. Every computer or browser has a unique ID,
your data stored in the cookies will be labeled with your ID, and whenever
you go online, it will synchronize the data with what you are looking for.

Sometimes, you might feel that cookies are intrusive and unnecessary, and
that is right. Albeit, cookies have proven helpful to internet users, web
developers, online retail store owners, and digital marketers (advertisers).
The general purpose of cookies is to help the websites keep track of your
visits and other online activities. Some websites use cookies that store your
login information such as username, email, password, etc.

How Do Cookies Work?

Most internet users do not know how cookies work. While cookies are
harmless and important, they are of different types and functions. Knowing
the types of cookies deployed by these internet servers, you can identify
how they work. The common types of cookies include:

● Session cookies: Webpage and internet servers use session cookies
when an internet user is actively navigating a website. The cookies
will only monitor and track your web activities when actively using the
webpage. As soon as you leave the webpage or close the tab, the
session cookies disappear.

● Persistent cookies: Persistent cookies are the opposite of session
cookies. They remain on the computer network after a long while, and
most times, they can track your activities across all web pages. That
is, if you check for a product on a chrome browser, persistent cookies
can track your activities on chrome and use it to suggest such a
product on another browser after a long while.

Other types of cookies include HTTP, magic, third-party, etc. However, all
types of cookies will either record your sessions online and vanish or keep
your data till the next visit.

Pros of Cookies

Some of the notable uses of cookies include:

● Personalization: Advertising has continued to take different
dimensions, and research shows that customized advertising yields a
good return on investment. Cookies are used to customize
advertisements and personalize internet users’ sessions. The pages
you visited, places you checked into, items in your cart, and web
searches will be recorded by cookies and used to tailor ads that will
interest you.

● Tracking: All web pages now use cookies to track users' activities
online. The monitoring will help synchronize and streamline your
internet experiences. Most times, the tracking will help you navigate
the web pages and quickly retrieve information from the trillions of
information available online.

Cons of Cookies

The shortcomings of cookies include:

● Hackers use cookies: Normally, cookies are safe and can not
transfer malware or viruses. However, we have seen countless
situations where scammers disguise viruses and malware as cookies.
An average internet user does not check the cookies policy before
accepting the cookies, so your privacy gets compromised when you
accept such malware in disguise as cookies.

● Zombie cookies: Some types of cookies are called ‘zombies’. They
are mostly third-party cookies that keep popping up, and when you
eventually accept them, they are hard to get rid of. When you delete
zombie cookies, it recreates itself. Zombies are hard to manage; they
erode your online privacy and give your web activities to unwanted
and unidentified parties.

Conclusion

Cookies have proven to be one of the best mediums to monitor user
activities and provide a convenient experience for internet users. Every
cookie has a ‘cookie policy’ that you can check and identify whether they
are worth accepting or rejecting.

It is believed that internet users do not know the impact of cookies on their
web pages until they disable all and realize that navigating the internet or
looking for what they need is not as easy as it seems. While cookies will
undoubtedly ease your web experience and navigation, the rate at which
web retailers use them must be cut down.