Cookies tracking: What is It and Ways to Stop It

Nwachukwu Glory  - Tech Expert
Last updated: January 15, 2024
Read time: 19 minutes
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This extensive guide is an A-Z booklet on cookies tracking and how you can block it on browsers alongside effective methods to stop it.

THE TAKEAWAYS

Cookies – tiny bits of text files – store various users’ information generated during internet surfing via web browsers. Website servers mostly drop these cookies in your browser, which remain stored there, and send back the collected data. The websites then use these cookies to streamline your browsing experience upon subsequent visits. Nonetheless, cookie tracking is also a favorite practice of websites, adversaries, hackers, spies, and other third parties. Thus, it threatens the users’ online privacy and secure web browsing. This guide elaborates all the details of cookies alongside the best possible workarounds to stop them.

You may have heard of cookie tracking without fully understanding what it is all about. Cookies are tiny bits of code that run on JavaScript, saved on the user’s web browsers. Government and intelligence agencies use it for surveillance.

The malicious actors available on the internet even use it to hack online users. At the same time, companies use cookies to track website users’ activities to personalize marketing content.

Marketing practices have drastically changed over the years, and digital marketing has come to replace traditional marketing. It means many organizations now deploy cookies and browser fingerprinting to monitor and study web users’ behaviours and preferences.

Cookies are intrusive, and they gain access to your personal information and send feedback to the tracker. Cookies tracking has caused many privacy concerns worldwide because it is of the easiest and most efficient ways of tracking people on the internet.

Cookies can track you down no matter the browser type you use, the device you have, and your ISP. However, this article will show you effective ways on how to protect yourself from cookie tracking.

We will explain how companies monitor your browsing behaviour with cookies. How they monitor your search preferences, store personal information about you, such as your login credentials, and so much more. And then, we will talk about how to stop them—everything step-by-step.