Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I wanted to talk about how I've changed up one aspect of my digital life: reviewing my cookies!

Cookies Are Bad

Cookies in general are bad for us. I think we know this!

The cookies I am referring to though, are cookies that many people don't seem to want to pay attention to, or simply don't know much about them!

Internet cookies are seemingly innocuously named but they hold a bit more nefarious element that many people are not really aware of. I know we've all heard of the term cookie in terms of our browsers, phones and computers. Sadly though, not a lot of people are really aware of what cookies really are!

Cookies are little bits of code that is inserted onto our phones browsers to help do some tasks that get offloaded to this. A lot of it is performance related, to preload some things but sadly these days that is not the focus. The primary focus of cookies in terms of our phones is to stick advertising shit on us and use that data perpetually and sell it via data brokers. It's some really nefarious stuff!

We can't get away fully from cookies and the need to use them for the various things on the internet, but we can at least learn some techniques and habits in order to properly manage them so that we can reduce the ability of these nefarious actors and companies from profiting off us and building a deeper profile of us psychologically and physiologically.

There have been many stories in the news lately, with some added details that people sadly really gloss right over! One of the most famous examples is how the idiot who tried to shoot the former President, Trump, had people visiting him routinely that were questionable. How did they find out that the dude got visited? There are really smart people on the internet and have some really technical skills. One of them is reviewing and analyzing the tracking data for cookies on the phones!

The person was found to have visited the young dude 14 times in a matter of months, meaning they had some sort of relationship; friendship or professional. Those details are completely glossed over in the review of the situation, but to me they really stuck out as a critical detail we had to keep an eye on.

The tech companies use things like cookies for so many things. Some of them are completely innocent such as trying to make their websites work better on your device. Those I am fully on board with because some of us remember the days where web pages loaded a line of pixels at a time LOL it was slow and painful! In the process of learning, developers realized they could preload things on your device as temporary items called "cookies" and it's been a great step from there.

The tracking and advertisement cookies, where they do it largely without our consent despite what the "cookie and privacy policy agreement" is on their websites. They still insert these malicious fucks until we opt out. When you first visit a website, it is a mindset of "insert cookies first" where they automatically inject the fucks, and ask questions later. This buckshot style is really nasty because they harvest and sell the hell out of that data. This is why Go*gle is so profitable, selling your data to shady people.

The style I've been trying to get into and stay in, is to routinely delete my cookies on my phone and laptop for the shit I don't want. I specifically look to make sure I don't have any Gogle, YT or other sites that I don't trust with my information, or want them profiting off anything I do. I have been pretty diligent about not visiting their sites but with many websites using Gogle services to run their ads and analytics, it's difficult to get away from them.

Having been in the habit of deleting these fucks every few days, I'm really able to, at least I hope, slow down the progression of their data collection activities on me.

Now I know the GIGANTIC caveat here is Hive and the things I do and write on here. I would like to say that this is a part of me, but it's not the whole part. There are a lot of elements that I leave off here, so tying all of the things together is hopefully more difficult than it would be for many other people.

What about you, do you try to manage your cookies on your devices? Why or why not?

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI. All pictures are mine unless otherwise stated}

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