What really is the point of Cookies

Mike

Mike

Well-known Member
Location
London
I really don't understand why retailers need to plant cookies
on my computer, if I have been browsing their goods, but
don't purchase anything, that acts like a starting gun for lots
of useless emails about their stuff.

If I go to a shop and look at stuff, then leave, is OK, the staff
don't come knocking at my door, telling me that they have a
newer version of what I was looking at and they can do me a
deal, this I believe is a fair comparison to what cookies are up
to, to continue advertising, instead of paying to advertise in a
newspaper, or on the TV, they just annoy us for free.

Mike.
 

I don't seem to have that problem @Mike. There are about a half-dozen retailers that I've done business with in the past who will occasionally send me an email message promoting a sale (which I don't mind). On the rare occurrence when an unsolicited email does arrive, I just mark it as spam and delete it. Maybe yahoo mail just has a good spam filter.

Do others share Mike's problem?
 
Everyone gets cookies planted on their computer if they look at a website.. most are for advertising, and they are shared not just with the website you're browsing but with hundreds of others. ..that's called 3rd party sharing..

Every website gives you the option to not accept those cookies.. however there are cookies which you cannot block, because it makes the website work, and its not possible for you to block them if you want to view that particular website..

It's very annoying.. to have to have these, the best you can do to get rid of them is to clear cookies and cache.. every night... but be aware if you do clear the cache, you will most likely have to reset passwords for all your regulalry visited websites.

I just clear the search history and cookies before I turn the coomputer off every night
 
I only use Chrome incognito mode for everything I do, and I have Chrome set to automatically clear all cookies whenever I close the browser. (The option to do that is in settings.) I've never had any issues.

I have read that some sites will not anyone to access their page via incognito mode, but I've only encountered that once, so I simply didn't visit that site.
 
I mainly use Firefox and don't have an issue with logging in and out and in on each website I visit that requires logins. Unfortunately, for the many websites that don't require logins but do want to place cookies, it tends to be more hassle dealing with continually having to opt out. Easier as @hollydolly related to simply delete those regularly. Google by just analyzing my searching, is obviously collecting data from my page loading sequences instead of discarding all of it, knows what I've been doing even without cookies. Thus, when I visited a website for keyboards like I did a few weeks ago and then deleted cookies and History, the next day I still began receiving unsolicited ads for keyboards.

There are also ways websites are increasingly at higher speeds getting at user information even without cookies by analyzing web IP traffic and then having AI rapidly figure out who is the unknown accessing their website. There are rising AI retail services increasingly providing such information. Having to annoying use a VPN will help, but I expect that strategy won't help much longer. What really needs to be done is for governments to legislate Internet limitations instead of continuing to allow commercial users and other powerful entities to run wild with it freely. The Internet today is very very different than the one I helped create in the late 1990s.
 
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