Can I eat ALL the Cookies 🍪🍪🍪
Om nom nom nom
This week we talk cookies. We start with the ones Cookie Monster loves and end up with the ones that browsers leave on your computer. The browser kind are now regulated resulting in an endless and annoying parade of pop ups asking you for consent when you visit a website. Like my post on Passwords, this week-in-Wirepine is brought to you by something that irritates me. There a is elegance and simplicity for users when tech is done right and just like passwords need fixing, so do cookies. Alas, I find no quick fix hiding in the wings for cookies but sites are handling consent better and advertisers are changing tactics. Regardless, you should understand what’s up so you can decide if personally you should eat all the cookies or if professionally you’d might want to bake up some cookies of your own.
But first a meander. If you’re here for the meat, scroll down to Part II of the article where I talk about browser cookies. If you enjoy the meander, settle in.
I Waze and the Cookie Monster
Cookie Monster needs no introduction - he is universally adored. He turned 50 a few years ago and according to this highly scientific survey he’s the most popular Sesame Street character of all time, beating out Elmo by a solid 3 points. Take note if you or your company wants to be loved half as much as Cookie Monster - chubby, fuzzy, blue, googly eyes, voracious and messy eater (On nom nom nom) poor grammar, loves to sing and dance and always happy.
You may not have heard of Waze, so here’s a little background. Waze was THE maps app in the heady days when mobile Apps were blowing up on the abilities of smart phones and GPS and location services and crowdsourcing. Remember that now boxy GPS probably from Garmin you bought for your car or even the GPS built into your car? You don't use that anymore right? Why? Waze.
In addition to always up-to-date maps, Waze added amazing real-time traffic and routing. How? The more people used Waze, the better it became. Every Waze user became a collection endpoint for traffic and route telemetry. Waze knew if you were stuck in traffic, how fast you were going and - if you played along - even where accidents were and when they cleared. All that info got aggregated up in the cloud and reflected in recommended routes, traffic patterns and ETAs. Waze also had a fun, community element to it. The graphics were bold and oversized. You could see other ‘Wazers’ on the map, change your icon/mood and … the voice that gave directions.
In tech circles Waze was an admired up and comer as an app that took advantage of key platform advances in a revolutionary way. My introduction to Waze was on a business trip with my CVP (big boss man) visiting an important customer in upstate Connecticut (it was GE). We landed at a regional airport in the middle of the night and I got behind the wheel of the rental car with him and no idea where I was going. Boss man fired up Waze barking out directions as I drove on the dark (and snowy) back roads of CT. Waze became my go-to road warrior weapon after that.
Waze confounded old school Taxi drivers. My dad was a taxi driver in LA and knew all the side roads and shortcuts. He was not impressed when suddenly everyone knew his shortcuts! Waze also laid the groundwork for Uber/Lyft who knocked off the Taxi industry but that's too much meandering and we cant make Cookie Monster wait.
In 2016 Waze announced Cookie Monster's voice for a limited time. I’m not sure why we don’t have a national Cookie Monster holiday commemorating that day - it was just … that … epic. Cookie Monster’s take on driving was right on. One of my favorite voice clips:
Police reported ahead! You see them? You think they want Cookie?
Our family would drive up to the mountains a fair bit back then for skiing and such and let me tell you - when Cookie Monster is telling you where to go the time flies by.
II Browser Cookies
Browser cookies are not nearly as fun as the happy serendipity between Cookie Monster and Waze. This part of the story is about advertising. Browser cookies pre-date Waze, but they’re not as old as Cookie Monster. In 1994 Netscape engineers (the guys who wrote the first mass market internet browser) created a spec for cookies as a way to enable online shopping. Cookies are little text files a site sends to a visitor and they are stored locally on your computer to save for example what’s in your shopping cart. The Cookie moniker is derived from a programming term referring to tokens or little ‘cookie’ packets of data passed between programs.
It wasn't long - couple years or so - that advertising companies figured out how to use cookies and share them between sites effectively tracking browsing activity. These are called third-party cookies and that’s how you get targeted ads. For example, say you search Google for 'Cookie Monster Socks' and click on the first link which happens to be an ad from Bombas a sock company. Later in the day you're scrolling through Instagram (or Facebook or Reddit or TikTok or …) and lookee here - Bombas is hitting you up with an add for socks. Cookies. This tracking is unsettling for many and quite impossible for users to unravel, so enter consumer advocates and regulation.
Waze brought back the Cookie Monster voice in 2019 for his 50th birthday. He is after all Waze’s most downloaded voice ever. Waze made it a big event with the tagline 'Waze can get you to Sesame Street.' OMG such brilliant marketing, I mean it!
Waze remains one of the top map apps worldwide. I just fired it up on my phone and nearly 20,000 Wazers are nearby so Waze is still killin’ it. Google bought Waze back in 2013 for $1.2B dollars. That was a good day to be one of the original 100 employees to the tune of about $1MM apiece!! A lot of what you see in Google Maps today is thanks to that acquisition.
In 2018 - just before Cookie Monster's 50th bday party the European Union passed landmark legislation governing data usage and protection - rocking the world of cookies. GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation is the EU framework for data protection, and it was followed by a number of other similar regulations worldwide and notably for Wirepine readers the California Consumer Privacy Act or CCPA. This legislation aims to give control back to you the consumer over the use and storage of your personal information across the internets.
This is all good but the way website are handling these new regs are not ideal. At their heart companies need you to buy stuff and cookies help do that and they don't want to make it easy for you to turn them off. So they ask you if you're ok (consent) to all the cookies. If you say yes you're done and free to continue browsing/shopping. If you say no, a couple of things typically happen:
You get a convoluted popup describing all the cookies and asking you to selectively pick the ones you want. I hate this because it's intentionally confusing, so you just go back to allowing all the cookies. These guys have an entire business around managing consent decisions through confusing dialog boxes.
You get a choice to reject all non-essential cookies with a single click. I like this and a website that takes this approach immediately goes up a notch in my mental trust tracking.
III YES you can eat all the Cookies
Don't confuse Privacy with Security. Security is protecting your personal information from unauthorized access to your online stuff like bank accounts or credit cards. Privacy is controlling how your personal information is viewed/used online. GDPR and CCPA are all about Privacy - you need to know that cookies don’t impact or compromise your security in any way.
Should you eat all the cookies? WWCMD? What Would Cookie Monster Do? Nom Nom Nom!! This is a bit generational - if you grew up with the internets, your norm around your online identity and data privacy is different and you probably are fine eating all the cookies. Cookie Monster says:
Count your cookies, not your problems.
Should you reject all the cookies? If you get a George Orwell big-brotherish jolt when you get an ad for something you or your spouse or your friend was checking out in a different context go ahead and reject all the cookies. It’ll keep your online life a little more private. You'll still get the ads, they just won’t be targeted based on your browsing history. If you do get a set of confusing dialog boxes explaining all the various cookie types - you can reject them all without a second thought (or read). You can also block all Cookies in your browsers Privacy settings. Both Chrome and Edge will let you do this and then you don't need to deal with it on a per-site basis. Cookie Monster says:
Early bird gets the worm. But cookie tastes better than a worm. So me sleep in.
Small business or non-profits may not have a lot of use or budget for targeted ads but here are a couple of interesting scenarios. Say you carry a line in your store from a known brand. They can do targeted adds and direct them to your store by location. Socks don't work so well in this example as there aren't many brick and mortar sock shops but say you are a local shoe store and someone searches for Birkenstocks which you are a reseller for. Wouldn't it be nice if they got an add on their feed from Birkenstock referring them to your location? Depending on your business there may be an angle here for you to bake some cookies of your own.
Cookie Monster congratulates you on reading the whole article - go celebrate with cookie!