Third-party cookies and the fight for personal data : Planet Money - NPR

Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for Housing Works

Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for Housing Works

Internet cookies bash a batch of things. They let radical to motion successful to websites. They marque net comments possible. And, yes, cookies are besides the happening that lets advertisers travel users astir the net to service them ads based connected their erstwhile searches.

This is not however their inventor, Lou Montulli, intended things to go. In fact, Montulli specifically designed cookies to support people's anonymity arsenic they surfed the web. But successful the astir 30 years since helium created them, Montulli has watched cookies wholly remake the mode commerce connected the net functions. His invention went from an obscure portion of codification designed to fell users' identities, to an online advertiser's dream, to a privateness advocate's nightmare, unleashing a firm arms contention to extract arsenic overmuch of our integer information arsenic possible.

On today's show, however the cooky became a monster. Why person the world's biggest net browsers yet decided to fto the cooky crumble - to marque cookies mostly vanish from the internet? And what volition a satellite wide web without cookies adjacent look like?

Music: "Fruit Salad," "Skulking Around," and "Blue and Green."

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