Cookies and trackers

Cookies, and cookie banners or notices have been around for a long time now. These notices are aimed at gaining consent to process personal information but it is often hard to see what that actually means. There are times it must happen, for example to provide a service or a product the company concerned does need to know who you are. But the spread of cookies across the Web has a far more sinister use and is often not understood by the general public. There have been all manner of attempts to cure the cookie issue over the past few years and the current crop of browsers have options to cut out third party cookies, for example. But the issue persists, in part because some websites simply ignore the rules or exist in jurisdictions where they do not apply, and in part because websites adapt to use first party cookies for the same purposes as before.

The marketeers will no doubt argue that nothing comes free, and I accept that to a point. While it may well be fair game for the likes of Facebook to monetise my data because the platform itself dopes not cost me to use, the desire to track my activities outside of Facebook is the opposite. Advertising is, of course part of everyday life. Commercial radio and television rely on it in order to present programmes at no cost to the end user - the viewing and listening public. But these large companies - the likes of Facebook and Google - have stepped way outside the circle that one may consider to be reasonable. While radio and TV adverts are one way, that is they do not know I have watched them or listened to them, when an advert on a website is presented the fact I have clicked on it can be recorded. I will expand on this next.

Take for example a TV advert. If one watches the advert and then calls the company, or if one buys a product and there is a card asking how one found it, any response is voluntary. Responses can be used to gauge the success of the advert. This is the old way of things, still relevant today.

Now take an advert on the web. By simply clicking on the advert the vendor or, more probably the advertising agency can see that the advert has been clicked. If one then proceeds to a purchase that too can be recorded and the data tied together. This can form a profile of the specific user.

However, we need to go one step further. All this data can be connected across many websites such that a user can be profiled and tracked across disparate purchases across many websites. This gives the advertisers far more detail than would be achieved by voluntary submissions to surveys and such. And the user has little choice. This data can then be used to form an advertising strategy and show that user adverts for specific products which may be related to previous purchases. It is this process that causes the notion that one is being stalked by adverts.

To try to put this into context, imagine someone enters a supermarket and purchases oranges. An agent notices this and follows this person out of the store and into another supermarket. The agent tells a member of staff in this second supermarket that the person in question purchased oranges. This member of staff approaches the person and tells them that as they have purchased oranges they may be interested in their apples. A rather cumbersome analogy but that is in essence what the advertising framework we now live within is achieving. You are not stalked by supermarket staff but you are stalked by adverts.

Of course, the general public hate these cookie banners and will just click OK to get to where they want to go. And they rarely see other trackers such as those used by Facebook.

Think of it like this. Advertisers traditionally used a variety of media to show adverts. These include adverts in magazines and newspapers, billboards, TV and radio adverts, flyers and direct marketing. Direct marketing – ‘junk mail’ and phone calls are generally regarded in a very poor light. Other forms of advertising target people passively. You may be interested in buying an item and see an advert for one. You may pass a billboard and see something which you might be interested in. It does not specifically target a person, it is a broadcast method simply aimed ‘out there’ rather than at you specifically. But there is no feedback except perhaps where a company carries out a survey or when a product is purchased one is asked where one found the information.

Advertisers changed this model into one that can target an individual by profiling them. Let’s be realistic here. Advertisers will try any trick to figure out who you are and what you are interested in. It’s Big Money. Cookie banners only serve to annoy people and there is a tendency to simply click them away. Some websites have a simple message at the top or bottom of the page detailing cookies and even better some do not have boxes pre-checked so clicking the message away does not set the nasties. Other sites have half the screen or an almost whole screen banner that you cannot get past without reading lots of legal notices that are hard to understand at the best of times. And of course others hide the whole process anyway and give no choice. There are technical measures one can take but why on Earth should we?

And for those designers who claim that their website cannot work without cookies… go back to school. I have cookies disabled on my phone for general browsing and so far I have only come across two websites that actually fail to work at all, both of which were hopelessly written. Yes you probably need a cookie for a shopping cart, but to show your home page? Come on.