• Question: Why on certain sites do we have to sometimes have to select “Accept all cookies for website”,does collect information for something? Does it still work in the background even with a VPN?

    Asked by cookieowl on 23 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Alan Diaz

      Alan Diaz answered on 23 Mar 2021:

      Yes and No!
      Most (if not all) of modern websites use “cookies”, which are pieces of software/code that learn about your interactions with the websites, for example, for how long do you stay in the website, where/what do you click, etc. The owners of the websites do this for a number of reasons, including (but not limited to): learn about your shopping preferences, learn about your reading, streaming preferences, etc. By accepting the cookies you give permission to the owners to “analyze and learn” this type of info from you. Unless you log-in to a website (i.e. Facebook), the collection of your data is done in an anonymous way, that is, the websites don’t know about you.
      If you were to read the Terms and Conditions you will find what exactly would they be monitoring about you.
      These cookies work in the background, but not really as a VPN, is more a “parallel” piece of software.

    • Photo: Peter Megyesi

      Peter Megyesi answered on 24 Mar 2021: last edited 24 Mar 2021 10:48 am

      VPNs in simple terms can* hide your IP address (your network and location info unique to any device you use). Some can even prevent certain ads from showing up but they will not stop or block cookies.
      *The reason I say can is that there are huge differences between VPN providers.

      What are cookies? They are parts of a website or application that collect all sorts of information about your online presence as Alan already outlined. Sometimes with the purpose to provide you a better user experience, sometimes to change your behaviour as a user i.e. to stay longer on the site, to buy something etc. How do they do that? By showing personalised content, in other words “the exact things” that would make you specifically stay longer, buy etc. For more infos on how personalisation can lead to bad things, I’d encourage you to watch the documentary called Social Dilemma.

      An important thing to note here is that you don’t even need to be logged into a social account though, the moment you connect to the internet, data can and will be collected about what you do… but you can indeed limit the extent of it.

      For more infos on how to do that and generally all sorts of privacy related topics check out https://defensivecomputingchecklist.com/
      which is a brilliant source of practical information.

      As you mentioned “Accept all cookies”, I’d also point out that you DO NOT HAVE TO ACCEPT them all 🙂
      But unfortunately it always takes more time to only select the functional ones or check the purpose of the rest… It’s something they don’t really want you to do.

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