Cookies

Learn how cookies are used and why they're an important component of browser tracking.

Introduction to cookies

The HTTP protocol is stateless and does not store information about different users on a website. This led to the development of cookies.

Cookies are documents that contain information, largely preferences, about the user browsing a website. For instance, when we’re viewing a website that’s in a foreign language and we change it to a language we understand, that information is saved to a cookie in the local machine. So the next time we visit the same website, it’ll read the cookie that it had saved earlier, and we’ll see that the language being used is the same as the one we’d previously selected. If you’ve ever faced a prompt like the one shown below, then you’ve interacted with cookies and are probably familiar with the type of information they’re allowed to store:

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