Ah, cookies…
But I’m not talking about the warm, gooey kind that make you feel safe and loved and add 3 cm to your waistline; I mean the digital parasites lurking behind nigh on every website, pretending to care about your “privacy preferences” while sneakily trying to track your every move.
We’ve all been there. You land on a website, eager to read a mildly interesting article or buy something you definitely don’t need, and Wham! (no George Michael in tight shorts), but a massive, screen-blocking consent pop-up appears. The options? “Accept All” (conveniently highlighted in bright, inviting green) or “Manage Preferences” (a tiny, begrudgingly offered and elusive link that might as well say, “Prepare for Battle”).
Click “Manage Preferences,” and you enter the labyrinth of digital bureaucracy. Here, you find an exhaustive list of tracking categories; Performance Cookies, Functional Cookies, Marketing Cookies, and something called “Legitimate Interest,” which is essentially a passive-aggressive way of saying, “We’re doing this whether you like it or not.”
But wait, your browser settings already say you don’t want to be tracked, right? Oh, how adorable! You thought that mattered? Websites pretend not to notice, forcing you to manually deselect a never-ending list of vendors whose sole purpose in life is to monitor whether you prefer semi skimmed or full fat milk. Spoiler: they already know.
At this point, most people either surrender to the “Accept All” button or rage-click through each setting, wasting valuable minutes of their life just to assert some digital dignity. And for what? To be bombarded with targeted ads for that one thing you mentioned last week when chatting with your mate who refuses to turn off their Alexa.
Of course, this is all in the name of “compliance.” Regulations like GDPR were meant to give users control, but instead, we got another frustrating game of Whack-a-Mole with tracking settings.
And let’s be honest, if websites truly respected our choices, there’d be a single, glorious button that said, “No tracking, respect my privacy, and get out of my face.” But where’s the profit in that?
So here we are, endlessly unchecking boxes, fighting a losing battle against the cookie overlords, knowing full well that somewhere, some marketing intern is still getting data on our questionable online purchases.
The solution? Short of overthrowing the internet, we can keep resisting, use privacy-friendly browsers (Duck Duck Go also stops those annoying utube adverts!), install ad blockers, and refuse to accept the digital gaslighting.
Or, you know, just embrace the chaos and start feeding the algorithm nonsense. Google thinks I’m a 70-year-old who loves tractor parts and knitting patterns. Joke’s on them.
Either way, one thing’s for sure: “Legitimate Interest” is the biggest oxymoron of the digital age.
Photo by rikkia hughes
