when tim burners leave
when tim berners-lee
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when timber oh come on
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when tim berners-lee proposed the idea
for the world wide web back in 1989 he
wrote about a universal
linked information system his exact
words a place to be found for any
informational reference which one felt
was important
and a way of finding it afterwards
three decades later and you've possibly
noticed
that the web is a bit of a mess
what happened to that universal
information system what even is a cookie
and why do we need to accept them there
are two reasons that the web is terrible
right now
first advertisers and second people
i actually just realized that uh i just
implied that advertisers are not people
and there's some really interesting
stuff about corporate personhood and
employees acting as a hive mind there
anyway uh let's talk about the
advertisers the first
versions of the web were simple text and
images
and links to other text and images you
could use forms to send information
but the whole thing was stateless this
means neither the web browser nor the
web server
kept track of you from one page to the
next you just sent a request for a
document
you got the document back and that was
it if you submitted a form
that one response could be tailored but
after that nope the server has forgotten
about you
because it can't tell you apart from
anyone else who's using the same network
now this wasn't long term a great plan
in theory you could hack together
something more complicated send forms
back and forth and people
did build things like that but they
break very very easily it was impossible
to have something both
reliable and personalized then in 1994
a programmer called lou montouli who was
building a web browser at a company
called
netscape came up with cookies adapting
an old computer science technique called
magic cookies they were so useful that
every other browser started to use them
as well
and they got built into the web
standards
a cookie is client-side storage your web
browser sends the request to the server
as usual but the server sends back
two things the page you asked for and a
little text file called a cookie
that your browser then saves and after
it's saved
every time that browser makes a request
to that same server
it sends the cookie along with it so
that cookie could contain your
preferences if you choose dark mode then
the browser would now send a dark mode
preference in that cookie
every single request if the server asked
for it then that cookie would last even
if you closed the browser and
restarted your computer for years and
years and years
or a cookie could be used for
authentication so after you've logged
into a site
that site gives your browser a cookie
that's just a long random string of
characters
but because no one except the server and
that cookie
have that long string of characters it
can act like a password
the browser sends it back along with
every page request
and the server looks it and goes oh yeah
yeah i remember you
the uh the designers of cookie looked at
that
and they knew that it could be used to
track people so there was a very very
important rule for privacy from the very
start
only the site that sets a cookie can
read that cookie back
except because of the way the web is
built sites can include material from
other
servers a web page can pull in an image
from somewhere else or some scripting
code or
even an entire other website included in
a frame and those other servers
could all set and read their own cookies
third-party cookies they were called so
when web pages included
advertising well those adverts
came from the advertising company
servers so those advertisers
could set a cookie that tracked people
across the entire
web if the same ad company partnered
with loads of different websites
they could start building up some very
very detailed profiles no
they might not know who you are at first
but they knew
they you visited that website about your
hometown then you visited that website
about your
college and then you visited that
website about a very specific
medical condition and then you bought
something from an online shop so they
can work behind the scenes
combining the details from that shop and
their cookies and add your name and
address to the profile
all those fancy share with facebook
buttons well yeah loads of them
could report back to facebook where you
were going hey look
this person's looking at all these sites
so now you can tailor adverts for them
which is why you could be on a site that
seems to be completely disconnected from
facebook
and still see adverts that were
uncannily
linked to things you've been thinking
about it took
a long while before regulators decided
that
maybe advertising companies having
enormous databases on basically
everything that people were thinking
might be a bit of a privacy problem
the european union acted first the
cookie law
which was the euphemistic name for um
this mess meant that all the eu member
countries had to put a law in place
requiring consent to place
cookies that wasn't particularly well
thought out because consent requires
clicking
okay and if there's a confusing box in
between the average person and the
article they want to read
look nearly everyone is just going to
click ok and by this point browser
makers were starting to give users
options to block third-party cookies
anyway so
advertisers were adjusting they were
tracking people not through cookies but
through
fingerprinting looking at all the
apparently
innocent individual quirks of how that
exact computer
was set up and how it rendered a web
page the fonts you had installed the
size of your monitor the website
you'd visited in the past all things
that individually
appear innocent and safe but which
together uniquely
identify each person browser makers and
advertisers ended up
in an odd war with each other about
privacy occasionally a civil war given
that
one of the most popular browsers and
also
one of the major advertising companies
were under the same corporate umbrella
so
later the general data protection
regulation gdpr put even stronger
requirements in place at least for eu
citizens
not just no cookies without consent no
tracking without consent at all times
the user must have full knowledge of
what they're signing up for and must
consent to it even if the company's not
in the eu even if they're
storing data on eu citizens outside it
still applies to them
the potential minimum fine is four
percent of the company's global annual
revenue not profit revenue or 20 million
euro
whichever is higher and yeah sure maybe
the eu couldn't easily find an
all-american company
but they can definitely stop them doing
business in europe if they don't pay
so all the advertisers had two options
number one
stop tracking people or number two add a
big box on each page saying hey
okay if we track you and legally you
should be able to easily say no and
still access the site opting out should
be a simple one-click process
and anyone who's been on the web likely
knows that's often
not true so yes at least some of those
pop-ups and frustrations are because
of advertisers certainly they normalize
the idea
of intrusive pop-up boxes but
why can they put those boxes that are in
the first place
the web is built around freedom of
design it's one of the most
fundamental principles within the box
that the web browser gives you
a designer can put almost anything
for decade after decade after decade
programmers have
pushed the limits of what's possible
someone has even managed to emulate the
entire windows 95 computer
in the web browser i don't mean just
making a web page look like windows 95 i
mean
an entire virtual machine that thinks
it's running on regular computer
hardware
but is actually just simulated in code
in a web browser and that's incredible
like give people power to create
and some will make amazing things but
some will look at the ability to run
almost any code and put
almost anything on screen at least
within that box and go
oh maybe i can get more newsletter
signups if i interrupt the reader
or uh maybe i can make people's browsers
mine cryptocurrency in the background
while they're while they're on my site
so the war starts again most web
browsers now have a separate view
that you can switch into that shows just
the text you want it might be called
article view or reader mode the browser
tries to figure out
what the main content is what the user
actually wants to see and puts
just that text on screen stripping out
the adverts removing all the pop-up
boxes and
yes losing all the creativity and design
that the web allows
but that reader view is a lot closer to
tim berners-lee's original design a
place for information
and a way to find it afterwards of
course there are already techniques to
detect
and defeat reader view and make sure
that the user has to see the adverts or
the newsletter pop-ups or
whatever else every bit of freedom that
a designer has for creativity and good
is also freedom for abuse that's true
not just on the web
but in every single aspect of the online
world
you