How should you answer a website’s cookie question?

Those web banners that want your input on cookies use varying verbs — accept, agree, allow, confirm and continue, among others — to ask what’s often the same request: Please let us track

your visit to our site. “A lot of these consent dialogs look pretty familiar,” says Aaron Massey, technologist and senior policy analyst for advertising technologies and platforms at the

Future of Privacy Forum think tank in Washington. WHY DO SITES KEEP ASKING THIS QUESTION? These queries have become common for one shared reason: data privacy laws in other parts of the

world. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation imposed privacy rules on companies doing business in the EU in 2018, and many sites haven’t looked the same since. “GDPR was

kind of the initial prompt for this,” says Angelina Eng, vice president of measurement and addressability at the New York-based Interactive Advertising Bureau industry group. “If there is

anything from the EU coming to your website, then you need to be compliant.” That’s why you may find some U.S. news sites are inaccessible while you are vacationing in Europe. Instead of

complying with the EU’s regulation, those sites block all traffic from there. More recently, the California Consumer Privacy Act has added rules, such as giving Californians the right to opt

out of sales of their personal information. As Massey puts it, these pop-up boxes aren’t a case of “the industry doing something just to make it more difficult for you.” Photo Collage:

AARP; (Source: Getty Images (2), Alamy) HOW YOUR CHOICES USUALLY BREAK DOWN The decisions that sites ask you to make about cookies — tiny text files saved in your browser — often involve

picking from a menu of flavors. Some are necessary cookies that websites use for basic visit management, Massey says. “These are first-party cookies used to maintain really basic details

about the session, like whether somebody’s logged in [or] not,” he says. Other first-party cookies can save your choices for options like your preferred language. Still more allow a site’s

operators to monitor how different parts perform. The controversial cookies are third-party cookies that other sites, usually advertising networks and social platforms, set to track your

habits across the web to determine your interests.