What are cookies and what we do when we click on “accept all”

Its name derives from a gastronomic analogy: biscuits always leave crumbs. That trace is the one that computer science has collected to baptize the little one information that we are launching when we surf the Internet. Still, a poll reveals that 42% don’t have much of a clue what they’re doing when they say they “accept” all Biscuits of a website.

How many of us really know what we are accepting when we accept all cookies? What consequences can it have for our privacy? What happens if we reject them? A campaign by Avast, the well-known antivirus, tries to answer these and other questions.

“Cookies were created in 1994 by Lou Montullithen developer of netscape Communications. Their goal was to ensure that e-commerce users could keep their shopping cart full of the same items as they surfed, even if they left the page and returned. ” Clarione Javier Rincón, regional manager of Avast America Latina.

The term “biscuits”, or biscuits, was derived from the term “magic cookie”, which is “a packet of data that a program receives and returns unchanged, used by programmers of the Unix operating system. “They are like an identity card made up of small pieces of information in the form of text that help computers do this interact with websitesand they can be both good and bad ”, explains the expert.

“On the one hand, they allow websites to remember information, such as logins or archived articles in an online shopping cart. On the other hand, they can record an individual’s browsing activity so that advertisers can use it for targeted advertising, “says Rincón.

But today cookies are much more powerful in terms of the functions they can perform.

What are the disadvantages of accepting cookies

“By accepting cookies, the user authorizes the websites to track the information about you, such as your browsing activity, search history and login details. This allows the website to personalize and optimize your user experience when you only browse that website.

It is important to remember that websites cannot access or view cookies installed by other pages. This is why each website individually requests the order from the user, which allows them to control who has access to the information.

According to the Avast survey, 42% of Argentine adults usually accept cookies on a website, mainly because they want to access the website’s content as quickly as possible. only 8% of Argentines said they usually reject cookies and 17% consult the policies of biscuits websites before setting your cookie preferences.

However, some pages may use cookies to track or even identify personal information, which may be collected, shared or sold to third partiesopening up consumers to more invasive surveillance techniques.

“Cookies can make you feel watched. They can follow you from place to place. Therefore, if you are looking for a new phone in Mercado Libre, for example, other pages can access this information about cookies and offer you targeted ads for that device (or competing devices). If those “related links” interest you, great; otherwise, they can seem intrusive, “he explains.

And he warns of a not insignificant detail: “Cookies can also affect the performance of the device. Too many can slow down your device“.

The good side of cookies: responsible use

The positive side of cookies is the practicality that emerges. “Cookies can be useful. They make it possible for the websites you visit provide a more comfortable browsing experience. For example, they can keep us connected to websites as you navigate from page to page and record preferences, such as session ID, for when you visit them again. The typical case is when the browser remembers passwords.

“Without them, meThe functionality of some websites may deteriorate And, by completely deleting the cookies, the settings and the saved accesses are deleted, together with the pages visited ”, he adds.

In short, “cookies are not inherently harmful, but they do collect and store personal data. For this reason, the European Union has enacted laws requiring websites to notify users that data about them is being collected. Over time, the user will accumulate hundreds or even thousands of cookies and get rid of them periodically is an important part of the general privacy hygiene“, To explain.

Avast’s campaign, called “Let’s Talk About Cookies,” also added chef Estefi Colombo to raise awareness: Those cookies we love to eat so much can be something to think twice about when we’re online.

“For my part, as an Internet user I had many doubts about what cookies were, and it was this that encouraged me to join the campaign, especially because doing something that I am passionate about, which is baking cookies, I would have helped raise awareness among Argentines on the correct use of digital cookies: we shouldn’t accept them without reading earlier as this could put our digital security and personal information at risk, “he said in a dialogue with Clarín.

However, despite the benefits of removing cookies from devices, more than a third of respondents (40%) admitted doing nothing with cookies they accept on their computer, while less than half (42%) delete them manually and one in six (17%) use software to remove them automatically.

Knowledge of the technology we are accepting in our navigation practices will certainly generate more awareness and, instead, “accept all”more than one user begins to reconsider what data they want to provide to the page they visit.