Should you care about cookies?

This is a uniquely European phenomenon, born of the desire to take back control of the degree to which people you don’t know are allowed to spy on what you do. But it doesn’t really do any such thing; it just gives publishers carte blanche to do as they please and to be up front about doing it.

Americans don’t have to bother with any of this. Those annoying “we care about your privacy” notices that you are required to tick before accessing a site are deemed neither necessary nor useful over there. So can you make them go away? And is it safe to do so? That depends on how and where you do most of your surfing.

At the heart of the matter are cookies themselves – small files of text that live in the bowels of your computer and keep a record of when you last visited a particular site and any preferences you selected for viewing it. Their purpose is to save you having to start from scratch the next time you visit, which in turn makes the sites more helpful. Amongst the data that cookies can remember are the contents of your shopping basket and whether you are logged in to a site, and with which account.

More insidiously, though, they can keep track of the type of information you looked at and use the data to serve you personalised adverts. And while cookies cannot harm your computer, they might contain information that could be useful to criminals in the event that your machine becomes compromised.

For these reasons, Brussels made it mandatory a few years ago for publishers to declare which cookies they planned to leave on your machine and for what purpose. You could then choose to accept or decline them.

That’s fine in principle, but clicking the “more information” button tends to produce only a stream of gibberish that is too time consuming to read, let alone act upon. Many publishers require you to deselect hundreds of advertising partners individually if you decline simply to accept them all. Even if you do tick the boxes selectively, you will have to do so all over again for each new visit.

You can save yourself a lot of clicking by installing a small app called I Don’t Care About Cookies, which works as an extension to Chrome, Firefox and other modern browsers and automatically hides the cookie warnings on almost any website you visit. It doesn’t block the cookies themselves; it just prevents the websites from telling you about them. If, like almost everyone, you are in the habit of clicking “accept all” just to make the warning go away, this will save you the trouble.

But the app works for the most part on computers only – not on phones. The mobile version of Chrome does not support extensions like this, and although its rival Firefox does, you may think it more trouble than it’s worth to install a completely new browser just for this. iPhones are more complicated still, requiring the installation of AdGuard for Safari and then a cookie blocking feature.

The bottom line here is in managing risk. Cookies are essential to maintaining the functionality you expect from a good website and if you’re determined to do without them, you may as well give up on the internet completely. And while it’s true that they may compromise you in the event of a cyber attack, the same could be said of everything else on your hard disk. That’s why it’s fine to accept them, whether manually or automatically.

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