We are going to dive into COOKIES and no, not the chocolate chip kind! We are talking about internet or web cookies. We know you're wondering- what are all these cookie consent pop-up boxes for and why have they been under such scrutiny? We're answering all the cookie cutter questions and more!
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Transcription
Hello, this is Monica Pitts and welcome to Marketing with Purpose. I'm all by myself today. I don't have any of my friends. But I am talking about a really fun and very relevant topic. And that's cookies. And no, I'm not talking about those lovely baked sugary nuggets of goodness, I'm talking about internet or web cookies. You may have noticed a new addition to some of your favorite sites. The little box at the bottom that states, "this site uses cookies," prompting you to accept or decline. And if you don't know about cookies, the box can feel a little scary. You might feel like accepting cookies puts you at risk. Here's the deal. Most modern websites use cookies. They're just not telling you. If a site uses cookies, they are visible through your browser at any time. So they're not really a secret. They're just not obvious to you.
So let's start at the beginning. Like what is a cookie? And no, like I said, we're not talking about baked goods here. We're talking about internet or web cookies. This is the type of message that's given from a web browser to a web server. And it allows websites to store information on your machine. They were actually developed in 1994. Yes, like back in the dark ages, by Netscape to make shopping carts for e-commerce possible.
If you had a bottomless basket of cookies, for example, these will be persistent cookies. And those types stay valid until they reach an expiration date, like asking a site to remember your login information. But there's also session cookies. Now, these go away at the end of the session or visit on a website.
So why do they even exist? I mean, there's three big reasons for cookies. The first one as we started discussing already is creating a more convenient user experience because some cookies bring joy and
this way, they're a lot like their baked namesakes. They make websites better for users. They customize a web page to your preferences, they can adjust the layout or the regional information. They can enable e-commerce and allow you to keep items in your shopping cart even when you leave a site. Using cookies, you can save your login information on a specific computer so you don't have to
