Do you know The Cookie Monster?

By Gnasher

I never knew him as well as I do now, thanks to HubSpot for making it clearer for me. They shared a blogpost with me, which contained the following key bit of text.

What’s the difference between a first party and a third party cookie?

The difference between first- and third- party cookies is how they’re saved and who can see them. When a website saves a cookie, it’s given a domain. If the domain on the cookie matches the domain of the website setting it, it’s a first party cookie. If the domain is different, it’s a third party cookie. First party cookies can only be seen when on the website that set it, where third party cookies are visible from any website.

This is why most ad tools use third party cookies; they enable a tool to track a user across multiple websites, and they can use that cross-site data from any other website to tailor ads.

One specific example:

Let’s say you’re on a website, a.com. It’s an ecommerce business. You put something in your shopping cart. When you come back later, the site remembers you, and keeps your same items in the shopping card. That’s the result of a first party cookie doing its job. The cookie was set by the same domain you’re on.

On the other hand, let’s say you’re on a.com, and the page you’re on contains an iframe from a different website (b.com). Cookies set by b.com accessed from an a.com page are third-party cookies. Accessing them from a.com is a cross-site request. This iframe might show you an ad via Doubleclick — — they track you across multiple websites, and serve you ads wherever you go online.

Every single time I click on a news story, that someone has shared on social media and I click through to the news website, I am confronted with a massive cookie notice, rendering the news story impossible to read. Of course most of us just agree to the notice, because we’re so hungry for that news story. But you have no idea that they are sharing your cookie with hundreds and maybe even thousands of vendors (that’s what they call them), actually advertisers, names you have never ever heard of all across the globe.

I did a video for you, so you can see for yourself and of course Facebook is complicit too, because they add an extra bit of spice on top of the tracking process with the Facebook Pixel. That way doesn’t matter if you’re active on Facebook or even have an account, they will track you off line as well.

[embed]https://youtu.be/nWUwZ2IXRqM[/embed]

The web has become an ugly and evil marketplace, the desperation of making money off every single visitor to your website has made the surfing experience a total waste of time. The TV once again has become attractive, I’m talking of course about the channels that do not serve ads, but that means we’re still paying aren’t we? Maybe an Internet that needs to be paid for, like your Spotify and Netflix could be a better future?

Happy surfing!

Michael de Groot

ps. My discussion on LinkedIn below.

[embed]https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stayingaliveuk_thats-it-ive-had-it-im-never-again-clicking-activity-6636525673294905344-Axdk[/embed]

Press

The first ENGLISH newspaper was first published in The Netherlands.

I know that might sound like a fake news story, but it is actually true. In fact they published newspapers for Italy and Germany before they published their own.

Here is the Wikipedia page that confirms the story and of course you may not believe Wikipedia either?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_newspaper_publishing

Well it all depends whether you’re Dutch like me and then you will convince yourself that indeed it is true. Or if you are a different nationality then you will read that your nation was the first one to publish newspapers, doesn’t matter that it wasn’t in English, correct?

Either way the press have been around for 400 years and news stories are being published every single second of the day at lightening speed. Because it is news, we have a built-in program, conditioned over centuries that whatever has been published by the press is actually true. After all it’s there in black and white and surely nobody would allow the journalists to write a fake news story and actually publish it?

Roll on the internet and now we find ourselves in the wild Wild West. Basically anything goes. But our brains are still conditioned to believe what has been written by the so called press must be the truth.

I have one great example to share with you, a story that reports on bad weather. Here in the UK we are obsessed with the weather and the press know this, so it’s always an excellent opportunity to publish an article about forthcoming weather events in the UK, especially snow and wind, they make a lethal combination to get our attention.

However reporters like to bend the truth in their headlines to pull you in to their story. Have a look at the screenshot below of a headline that caught my attention. Now you may suggest to me that it’s just a coincidence, but I’ve been studying news headlines all through 2017 and have noticed patterns, especially about outlandish weather headlines that hardly ever were true.

The first part of the headline suggests that hundreds of people are stranded in heavy snow. The second part is confirming a forecast 70 mph winds set to batter London and Southeast.

The headline starts off by saying that the news is Live, so it can be misunderstood to say that at the time of that story being published, people are stranded in London and the Southeast with 70 mph winds. It’s ever so subtle but it attempts to get you to click through, which of course I did.

We don’t read properly on the web, we scan and journalists know this, you’re even scanning when you reading this article.

Can you see what I mean with misleading and outlandish headlines? The next day there were even more headlines along the same lines. I’m guessing that weather stories are clickbait for the press to get us to their sites. Makes you wonder doesn’t?

Happy reading?

Michael de Groot