RU EN
www.
4 min read

Cookies. The Digital Traces You Leave Everywhere

You visit a site. The site asks — «accept cookies?» Most people press «accept all» to close the annoying window faster.

It is a small text file that a site saves in your browser. The size of a few lines of text. It contains a unique identifier — your personal number for this site. When you return to the site — it reads this file and recognises you, not by name — but by number, but that is enough.

Three kinds of cookies and how they differ

Technical cookies — necessary. They remember what you put in the cart, that you logged into your account. Without them the site does not work. These are the only cookies that are genuinely needed. Analytics cookies — track your behaviour on the site. Which pages you opened, how much time you spent, where you clicked. Collected by Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrica and dozens of other systems. You get nothing from this — but the site knows everything about how you use it. Advertising cookies — the most aggressive. They track you not on one site — but on thousands of sites simultaneously.

You visit a shoe store’s site. The site loads an advertising script from C*****. C***** saves its cookie in your browser with a number, for example 7264faef-4ps0-45dd.

  • You close the store and go to read the news. The news site also has the C***** script. C***** reads its cookie — recognises you by the number 7264faef-4ps0-45dd — and shows advertising for the very shoes you were looking at.
  • You did not register on the shoe site. You did not give your name. But C***** knows that you are you on both sites. Because the number matched.
  • This is exactly how retargeting works — advertising that «pursues» you across the whole internet.

How many cookies are collected in one visit

When you visit an ordinary news site — not one cookie loads but dozens. Every advertising partner of the site sets its own. In one visit to kaup24.ee, in my browser cookies were set from: G******, C*****, X****, A****, 5, P*****, c********** and a dozen more companies. All of this in seconds while the page loads. Without a separate notification about each. (I have hidden the company names with “*****” for confidentiality; if you want to find them yourself, you will — I am showing how the market works without exposing faces and data, that is not needed for now.)

  • Technical cookies live until you close the browser — that is normal.
  • Advertising cookies live for years. C****** — until 2027. A****e — until 2026. X***** — until 2026. They accumulate the history of your behaviour month after month.

What to do

  • First — do not press «accept all». Look for the «only necessary» or «reject all» button. It is almost always there — just hidden or made less noticeable. This is called a dark pattern — a design that nudges you towards a choice disadvantageous to you.
  • Second — clear cookies regularly. Browser → Settings → Clear data → Cookies. Once a week is enough. All the accumulated identifiers disappear. The brokers lose the history — and start collecting anew from scratch.
  • Third — use a browser with protection. Firefox with the uBlock Origin extension blocks most advertising scripts before they load. The Brave browser does this automatically without additional settings.
  • Fourth — incognito mode. Startpage. Does not save cookies after the window is closed. Does not make you anonymous — your IP address is visible. But advertising cookies do not accumulate between sessions.

Before 2018 sites set cookies without any notification. Silently. Automatically. GDPR obliged sites to ask for consent. This is precisely why since 2018 these windows are everywhere. The problem is that most people press «accept» without reading. Companies know this and design the windows exactly so — a big green «accept all» button and a small grey «settings» link. The law exists. But it works only if you use it.

The main thing to remember

A cookie in itself is harmless. It is just a file. What is dangerous is the system built around it — thousands of companies synchronise their cookies among themselves in order to assemble a single profile of your behaviour on the internet. You are one. There are thousands of them. But you have a «reject» button. Use it.

← All journal entries