Incidentally, this basic technical mechanism of leaving cookies-as-text in your browser’s cookie jar also allows services unrelated to the sites you’re visiting to park information about you. These are called “third-party cookies,” and I recommend you disable them in your browser’s settings after reading this. Doing so will let you exercise greater control over your identity and choose who you want to permit knowing things about you—otherwise, it becomes easier for you to appear at that random restaurant that knows all about you even before you’ve stepped through the door. It’s possible to turn off all cookies on your browser, including first-party cookies, but doing so makes the Web much more cumbersome to navigate. Cookies bring convenience, because they mean you don’t have to remember a password to a service you’ve already logged in to—a cookie gets placed on your computer to mark it fully authorized as “logged in” so you don’t have to go looking for your password somewhere in your pile of notes. And don’t worry, cookies aren’t inherently harmful.
For the foreseeable future, you will be constantly trading computational convenience for digital information that you reveal about yourself. The more privacy you give up, the more convenience you get. Said differently, when you share information about yourself, you are guaranteed the pleasure of getting what you want instead of feeling the pain of being served incorrectly. For example, every hotel chain out there is aware that I don’t like to stay in a room next to the elevator. In a similar vein, every airline out there is aware that I prefer an aisle seat. Do I mind that they know this about me? Not at all, because it means my desires are more likely to be met. What I do mind is when information about me is disclosed without my permission. But it’s hard to know these days when you’ve given your permission to a company when verbose walls of text pop up to ask you to accept the terms of service before you can get to work. What did you agree to?
There are moments when you explicitly opt in to be instrumented and telemetered, like when a site asks you to reveal your location to it. If every layer of technology were to do so similarly, then ultimately you would likely not be able to use the internet as you know it because there are a lot of assumed permissions that we’ve already handed over. Your new awareness of the complicated nature of the computational universe should make you aware that it’s quite possible your internet service provider is storing and selling information about you—in the United States, this is currently fully legal. The same can be said about your telephone network carrier, or the cloud companies, or your favorite apps, or even the physical device you’re using—all of them could be independently telemetering and collecting information about you 24/7. The question of knowing how your data is being shared, both willingly and unwillingly, is an emerging dimension of design that I’m intensely interested in from a computational product perspective. It’s a topic that could fill many books, but I’ll just leave you with the realization that this is really big. And if you’re not fully convinced, check out the American Civil Liberties Union’s prescient piece from 2004, “Scary Pizza,” which depicts a future when an innocent call to a local pizzeria to order a pizza becomes entwined with the caller’s health records and employment history, among other bits of information. The pizzeria ends up charging extra for the caller’s attempt to order extra cheese when they’re supposed to be on a diet, and the caller is naturally alarmed by how much the pizzeria knows about them.