Privacy ⁽¹⁾

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…