Almost all well established sites on the internet these days ask for cookies consent. Most of the times it is important to accept cookies to use the website.
Usually people often find it just annoying. Most of the times cookies can save a lot of time as they fill the information automatically for you saving you a lot of time.
What is the use of cookies
Cookies are used to enhance user’s experience on their website by storing the users data locally on browser. This data may include, your form details that you filled on website, the configurations you made on website, track user behavior, maintaining user sessions , for securing information like stopping possible frauds via cross-site scripting, etc.
Cookies are stored in text format on your browser, when you visit the website again then your browser act as a middle man who provides cookies to the server of website. Few cookies have expiry headers which means you need to accept them again after a period of time, such cookies are generally used in affiliate websites.
Why are Cookies important for a website
In some countries and EU, it’s important for website to have Cookie consent. It is done to tell user about what data they store, information about the third party website involved in website. This is done to maintain the users privacy.
Most of the big websites have personalized cookies for different countries which follow the local legal data protection rules. Like the European Union enforced the General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR) in May 2018, new legislation aimed at protecting the security and privacy of online personal data of every European citizen.
Should I worry about accepting cookies
This is a very common question a lot of people have the answer is No, as they are just the data stored by a website in text format, it is not a virus but, they can pose a threat to your privacy, but it depends on factors like what the website is about and what data you are giving on website.
If you’re afraid that you’ve already accepted cookies on websites where you wouldn’t want your information to be collected you can simply go into your browser’s settings and use the “clear cookies” option.
How to delete cookies
The steps involved in deleting cookies can be different from browser to browser but a simple hack is to use search button on settings option of your browser and search for cookies and select clear cookies option. By using search button all the options with cookies will appear highlighted.
search button
Also if you don’t want Third-Party cookies as they are usually used for advertisement and tracking Purposes you may consider to block them.
Very useful stuff