A Lot of Websites Ask You About Cookies. How Should You Answer?

At some sites — the Future of Privacy Forum’s website is a good example — the dialog box of choices comes preset to block nonessential cookies. At other sites the choice is up to you.

When to click yes or no

“I don’t have any concerns accepting the dialog,” Eng says, explaining she’s seen members of her trade group use this data only to find broad groups of people. “They never specifically home in on a particular user. They use that data to create what we call cohorts in different marketing segments.”

But companies aspiring to reach customers this way should avoid being too creepy or leaving people feeling powerless, she says.

“I think we probably as an industry need to do better in terms of providing full transparency and control for consumers.”

Tip: You can see the profile Google has built of your interests at myadcenter.google.com.

Sites that offer rewards for clicking through to a shopping site, such as shopping portals that airlines maintain to help people build their miles balance, represent a special case for allowing those cookies.

Tiffany Funk, managing editor of the travel blog One Mile at a Time, says companies have been developing ways to track these click-through transactions without needing cookies. One example is the browser extensions many shopping portals offer.

But she’s not ready to rely on those workarounds, so she enables all cookies in those cases as a matter of self-interest.

“You’re benefiting from the transaction being tracked correctly between the publisher and the advertiser,” she says.

Massey concurs that this scenario represents a different bargain: “You, the consumer, by participating in this, can get some remuneration.”

Your browser can choose for you

Instead of clicking endlessly to deny third-party cookies, your browser can do that work for you automatically. Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Edge and Mozilla Firefox all block tracking and marketing cookies by default and will also report how many of these third-party cookies they blocked.

For instance, AARP’s website employs third-party cookies. Safari lists 15 as being “trackers prevented from profiling you.”

Meanwhile, Google’s Chrome allows third-party cookies by default. Google is planning changes to ensure that advertisers can still model the interests of large groups of people without using cookies, but it has repeatedly postponed those plans.

So making a non-Google browser your default can let you ignore the cookie questions at sites if you’re looking for more privacy across the web. It can also defend your privacy if a site tries to place tracking cookies even after you decline them.

But sites have other ways to track you

Researchers at the Swiss university ETH Zurich conducted an automated analysis that estimated 65 percent of sites studied likely did not honor cookie rejections. The team did not respond to questions about the research it plans to present at a security conference in August.

Massey warns that sites can use other techniques, such as “browser fingerprinting,” to track people who don’t use cookies. Your browser’s fingerprint includes such information as the device it’s on, installed extensions, keyboard layout, languages, operating system, time zone and version number. Alone, the information doesn’t mean much, but amassed it allows a website to figure out that you’re not your neighbor.

Apple has upgraded Safari’s defenses against those alternate sorts of tracking in recent releases.

Advertisers already collect less data because of the browser defaults and the limits that Apple and Google now place on mobile apps in iOS and on Android devices, says Eng of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

“About 60 percent of data signals have been lost [in] the past five years,” she says.

Massey suggests that finding a post-cookie standard that expands people’s privacy and allows advertising to keep most sites free to read won’t be easy.

“It’s a hard problem to solve,” he says. “You still need to have some mechanism for a robust advertising ecosystem.”