Good morning!
Happy Monday everyone, here’s to a great week ahead,
☕☕❤️
If you like reading these I would love if you could support me at the very end of this email
Anyway, C’mere to me…
Cookies 🍪
The creepy internet ad ones though…
How many times a day do you click ‘accept cookies’ from a pop-up banner?
… but what exactly are they? and how do they follow you over to social media ads?
A ‘cookie’ is simply a string of numbers and letters that form a unique ID.
They are used to identify you/your computer and essentially allow the web to remember things.
It is important to note that web cookies actually enable several features we couldn’t browse the internet without.
Say every time you clicked a new link on Facebook you had to sign in again, how annoying would that be?
Imagine every time you added something ‘to your cart’ when shopping that it then disappeared when you clicked elsewhere…
Or imagine when an individual visited your website, that the server interpreted it as being several site visitors, rather than in reality it was one visitor simply browsing several pages.
Cookies, however, seem to follow you everywhere you go online and naturally they also come with a lot of scrutiny about their fair use and disclosure…
There are so many types of cookies from Secure, Authentication, Session etc, all with different functions, the vast majority have no mal intent whatsoever.
When you engage with a site, cookies are stored on your browser so that the website knows it is you and can tailor the experience, and take analytics about who uses their site.
Known as ‘First Person Cookies’, these can leave all sorts of information such as location, time spent on certain pages or products, and anything given by the user such as email addresses etc
However, first-person cookies were designed to only be stored and retrieved by the same site that left them on your computer,
…but this information is so lucrative to businesses and advertisers that it encourages sites to collaborate.
This is why ads follow you from your browser to Facebook & Instagram ads, they are known as ‘Third-Party Cookies’, and this is what I want you to focus on.
Retail sites can place ‘Third Party Cookies’ on your browser, essentially shops can place Facebook and Google cookies, so that the shop can then advertise on those platforms to its customers.
Through ad spend it can choose to target people who visited their site, and the reason Facebook and Google know who to target is because the retail site planted Third-Party Cookies belonging to those tech giants and therefore handing over the information.
(but you consented to this)
In chrome and other browsers you can specifically block third-party cookies, however, you have to go looking for this setting…
Even so, huge sites that rely on ad revenue such as Facebook, are finding ways around this…
My advice:
Read up on cookies
Block Third-Party Cookies in your browser.
Photos I Saved 📷
Watch 📹👀
Following on from my email with the cautious take on vegan substitutes, this is very much the opposite.
I will always recommend a video from Mark Rober, an incredible human being, but here he breaks down, in a positive light, products from both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.
Burger King is one of the few places you can source the heme patty’s in Ireland, but I would be so curious, hopefully sometime in the near future, to buy the heme mince and add it to a week’s worth of dishes and see if I can truly tell the difference.
Think 🤔🤯🌊
“Duck" is the most unintentionally typed word on the internet.
That’s all for now 🤙🏽
Feel free to reply ↩️ to this email!
I love to hear your thoughts.
Please Share 🤗
If you enjoy reading this every week I’m sure your friends would too.
cmeretome.substack.com
Consider Supporting ☕💗
If you like my content and want to give back in the simplest (non-commitment) way possible, please consider buying me a coffee.
That’s how they get ya…
Thank you,
Guy