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No, I’m not talking about those yummy smelling and tasting baked items. I’m talking about those often annoying “trackers” that websites put on your computer when you visit them. The mission is: investigate cookies and see what my favorite websites do when I do not allow my browser to accept them.
I just cleared my cookies on Saturday. Since then, I have accumulated approximately 400 cookies. Looking through the list, I do see the usual suspects such as Facebook, Indeed.com, Youtube and Yahoo. However, most of the cookies are things I have never heard of, such as ytsa.net. I just deleted my cookies and also set my browser to never accept cookies – let’s see how far I can get on my normal websites and what cookies I collect as I travel the web briefly.
Yahoo: My homepage is Yahoo, and it opens as usual. Clicking on a few random news article links, I find that I am not obstructed from viewing by not having cookies enabled.
Facebook: Next, I’ll try one that I know I’ll have trouble with—Facebook. The login page opens just fine, but after trying to login in, I am stopped by a page with a red box screaming “COOKIES REQUIRED.” Obviously, I will get no further here.
Blackboard: Blackboard is the online tool/website my college uses for its online classes, and since this article is for one of those classes, I better try it! I don’t even get to the normal Blackboard homepage – instead, I see a page scolding me for not having cookies enabled and even instructs me on how to turn them back on. I cannot proceed past this page.
Banking website: I bet I won’t be able to get on my banking website either! The home page opens just fine, but can I log in? No! Despite the fact that I’m entering the correct log in information, I am not allowed to log in without cookies enabled.
Allrecipes: This is one of my favorite websites, and I’m not expecting any problems accessing it without cookies enabled. The home page opens without a hitch, as does the first recipe I see—Melt in Your Mouth Meatloaf. This website operates fine without cookies.
Now that I’ve visited five different websites with cookies disabled, I am going to enable cookies and go back to those same five websites and see how many cookies I get from visiting them. Ok, that’s done—now let’s see about those cookies. In the approximate 2 minutes it took me to visit those 5 websites and log in to those that require it, I acquired 23 separate cookies. Out of those 23, I only recognize 7. Each of the websites I went to directly placed a cookie on my computer, as did a couple of the links I clicked on in Yahoo that went to news articles. I can only assume that the others are advertising related. Delving deeper into the cookie world, it appears that while some of the cookies actually expire at the end of my session (which, I assume, is when I close the browser), most expire anywhere from 1 month – many years from now. The latest expiration date I saw was December 31, 2037.
I knew cookies existed, of course—though I must say, I prefer the baked ones much more!—but I had no idea that so many are placed on computers. I figured I’d see cookies for the websites I went to, sure, but not all of these random advertising cookies. While I’m not completely sure what the cookies are for, I imagine that some dictate what type of advertising you will see on your browser when you’re surfing the web. Then, of course, there are the ones that basically “allow” a website to remember that you’ve been there before, and I don’t have a problem with those. However, I do have a problem with the random cookies that come out of nowhere. I think that most people know that there is basically no privacy on the internet—this just proves it.
