Cookie Preferences: What Does Consent Really Mean?
Article originally published on: https://www.wired.com/story/what-do-cookie-preferences-pop-ups-mean/
As an internet user, it’s common to see popups about cookie preferences, asking you to accept or decline before proceeding. Typically, we just go ahead and accept them, or simply close the popup, without even reading and understanding what they mean.
Cookies are a mechanism used by websites to store data about the user. This information is stored on your computer and is used by the website to improve your experience. There are different types of cookies depending on the data they store and how long that data persists. The presence of cookies has been on websites for a long time, but the occurrence of these popups asking you to accept or deny has become a more common practice due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced by the European Union and was put into effect on May 25, 2018. Every organization regardless of the location is bound to this law whenever they collect data on EU citizens.
Even though this regulation exists, there is still a lack of transparency on how cookies work and who manages the data collected from them.
It’s important to read the message about “use of cookies” before accepting them, so you have a better understanding of what the cookies are about and how they will be used. Browsers also allow you to clear stored cookies for a particular website; it’s important to have the practice of clearing cookies too, especially if you accepted them by accident or you just don’t want them to persist.