Cookies here, cookies there. The ineffective cookie notifications that appear when you first access almost any webpage, and their link to tracking and advertising, mean that we have caught a little cookie crazesometimes becoming obsessed with deleting them or finding an alternative. And yet, cookies are useful.
Browser cookies are a tool whose problems could not have been foreseen when they were created in 1994. 30 years later, cookies have hardly changed and continue to be a fundamental element when browsing the Internet. They are useful for more than we think..
What are browser cookies used for?
Cookies, like app cache, seem to exist only so we can delete them, but that is not the case. They are essentially small documents saved locally in your browser
Cookies allow a website save a small amount of data in the browserthat there would be no other way to save. Data such as website preferences, whether you want to use light mode or dark mode. If they were stored on the server, the server itself would have no way of distinguishing who each user is, unless they first log in with their account.
A traditional piece of information stored in cookies is the active session, so you don’t need to log in again every time you reopen the webpage. Therefore, after clearing cookies from a website, you will need to log in again on your next visit.
On a more mundane level, cookies also allow us to add elements to an online shopping cart without having logged in. Without the cookie that identifies us, the web server would have no way of knowing if the liter of milk goes into our basket or that of any other user. Of course, this identification is also used for malicious purposes, being the most widespread way to track a user and an advertising profile through which to display personalized ads. Here are the main uses of browser cookies:
- Log in. Cookies allow you to stay logged in without having to re-enter your username and password each time you open the site.
- Saving preferences. Settings such as preferred language, theme or any other questions, locally, without having to log in.
- Basket. Cookies allow you to use the shopping cart on e-commerce sites without having to log in.
- Web analytics. Cookies are used to collect data about how users interact with a website.
- Advertisement. Cookies are used to display personalized advertising based on the user’s browsing behavior. In this case, third-party cookies are usually used.
- Follow up. Related to the previous one, cookies can be used to analyze the websites visited by a user and generate an advertising profile.
As a user, you may not be interested at all in the last three uses of cookies (web analytics, tracking, and advertising), which are the ones that have given them a bad reputation for years. Cookies as such are neither good nor bad.but they depend on the use that is made of the web pages you visit.
It is possible to live without cookies, although in return the Internet is a little worse because you have to log in every time you visit a web page and every time you want to save data. However, the final decision is yours and you will always have to delete cookies selectively or only accept certain cookies.
In Xataka Android | In Chrome for Android you can see the content of cookies. What is it for and how to do it
