

Ask HN: “We use cookies on this site to enhance your experience” - chrisbennet

Do web sites really do this to &quot;enhance your experience&quot; or is it to enhance <i>their</i> experience in some way (better monetize&#x2F;track&#x2F;etc)?  I&#x27;m not a web adept so I really don&#x27;t know.<p>This site for example: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mosaicscience.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;how-bee-sting-saved-my-life-poison-medicine<p>When I get a piece of snail mail that says &quot;Important! Open Immediately&quot; on the outside, I always think &quot;Important to <i>whom</i>?&quot; - it is rarely important me.
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luckyshot
Good cookies are usually used to:

\- remember your language/country,

\- store a temporary authentication token (when logging into a website,
checking the "Remember me" checkbox) so you don't need to re-login every day,

\- remember your name after you filled a commenting form on a blog post so the
next time you comment it's already there

\- etc.

Bad cookies are used to track you across different websites so they can target
advertisements to what you have searched on Google or what pages you have
visited.

If you are concerned about your privacy you should use an extension such as
Ghostery to block trackers and other bad cookies and then, as trebor says,
accept all the other ones coming from 1st party sites since they usually want
to help you

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trebor
The answer is "yes".

The problem is that the web isn't stateful, as we term it, so each request you
make is a totally blank slate—except for cookies. If they do any expensive
computations and then cache them in the session (temporary data associated
with your browser _through_ a cookie) clearing your cookies will force them to
do it again.

In my experience it's better to trust 1st-party cookies that the site you're
visiting directly may set, rather than trusting all 3rd party cookies set by
folks like Google or Facebook.

A simple example is that you indicated some preference. The only way for the
browser and server to retain that preference is via a cookie.

~~~
chrisbennet
Thanks!

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27182818284
They're a dot UK company. This is a way of spinning the cookie compliance in a
little bit more positive tone.

[http://kellywarnerlaw.com/new-uk-cookie-law-
compliance/](http://kellywarnerlaw.com/new-uk-cookie-law-compliance/)

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mrcold
It's an European law:
[http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm](http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm)

Websites that use cookies in any way must prompt the user about it.

