Death of a Cookie
A critical look at browser cookies, excerpted from Tough Cookie
Accept cookies?
It’s impossible to spend time online without encountering this seemingly simple question. Most people reflexively hit “accept” without questioning what it means, or how cookies got brought into a decidedly non-edible situation in the first place.
We’re happy to share another excerpt from our fourth issue, Tough Cookie, that hinges on answering this very question—and why it may soon become obsolete.
Death of a Cookie
By VSOON
We welcome you all here today as we lay to rest the browser cookie, a small but mighty feature of the internet and the surveillance capitalism that has come to define it.
The early days of the internet promised liberation; yet today’s web, and its cor- responding economy, are almost entirely built on surveillance. We’re all tracked online and we all know it. While there are many technologies used to track our activity on the internet, cookies may be the most ubiquitous.
Web cookies were created in 1994 by programmer Lou Montulli while he was working for Netscape. This was one year before the final commercial restrictions of the internet were lifted, which laid the groundwork for the eventual rise of big tech. Cookies enable some of the basic online functionality we’ve become reliant on: helping websites keep us logged in and storing items in our online shopping carts. However, despite their appetizing name, not all cookies are considered trustworthy. Third-party cookies track us across multiple websites and are most commonly used for targeted advertising. They have become an unavoidable feature of the internet, as well as a major privacy concern.
The giants of Silicon Valley are among the world’s wealthiest companies and, for the most part, primarily aim to sell us consumer products. These ad-based businesses have flipped the traditional revenue model on its head. Consumers are the product these companies sell by commodifying the personal data we generate while using their services free of charge. “Don’t you want to see relevant ads over useless junk?” It’s an argument for normalization that holds little water for anyone who has used the internet: as if seeing online ads for bidets months after purchasing one is an optimized experience. It shouldn’t be lost on us that in its effort to sell more bidets, big tech has essentially created the largest surveillance apparatus in human history. It also shouldn’t come as a surprise that if you build a massive surveillance system, it may be put to questionable use. From enabling global surveillance by governments (NSA global spying) to facilitating widespread political disinformation (the 2020 election), more questionable actors than the bidet advertisers are utilizing the same infrastructure for their own ends.
Between regulation and automatic blocking by browsers, cookies as we’ve known them are being laid to rest. In recent years, privacy concerns have impelled regulators to legally limit non-consensual tracking of users. At the same time, growing public distrust has pushed internet browsers such as Safari and Firefox to automatically block the cookies that track users across the internet. Google Chrome, the world’s most popular browser, is set to follow suit in late 2024, effectively marking the end of the cookie era.
But, of course, an industry built on selling our data isn’t giving up on tracking us. Google, for example, has been so effective at capturing the majority of users’ daily usage online that they do not need to track users across the web in order to surveil much of their activity. For many of us, social media and smartphone apps have largely replaced navigating from website to website. Instead, we like, comment, location tag, and post on Instagram, TikTok, and Meta.
As the way we use and interact with the internet continues to change, so will the ways that we are tracked online. It’s the death of the cookie as we’ve known it—but don’t expect the dawn of a new, less stalker-y internet. Online surveillance has shifted with our habits, and is now conducted through smartphone sensors and smart devices like speakers and fridges. It doesn’t matter if you “accept cookies” or not—there’s likely something already gathering much more intimate data about you than a web browser ever could.
VSOON is an art collective composed of Noah Emrich, Chris Fussner, and Sophia Callahan that once created an installation for NYCxDesign week called Datacafe.biz, a cafe where visitors could exchange personal information for a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie.
Misc Dessert Content:
Read: Sweet City, a new NYC sweets-focused newsletter from writer Mahira Rivers highlighting gems like the snacks to seek out in Chinatown grocery stores and Salty Lunch Lady’s silky coconut pandan pie.
Bake: Buttery, floral Earl Grey teacake with chocolate and orange, from Samantha Seneviratne.
Support: The wonderful BEM bookstore is fundraising to open a permanent home for Black food literature in Bed Stuy.
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