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Individuals Simple read

The inventor of the digital cookie has some regrets

When Lou Montulli invented the cookie in 1994, he was a 23-year-old engineer at Netscape, the company that built one of the internet’s first widely used browsers. He was trying to solve a pressing problem on the early web: Websites had lousy memories. Every time a user loaded a new page, a website would treat them like a stranger it had never seen before. That made it impossible to build basic web features we take for granted today, like the shopping carts that follow us from page to page across e-commerce sites.

Within two years, advertisers learned ways to essentially hack cookies to do exactly what Montulli had tried to avoid: follow people around the internet. Eventually, they created the system of cookie-based ad targeting we have today. Twenty-seven years later, Montulli has some misgivings about how his invention has been used—but he has doubts about whether the alternatives will be any better.

Individuals Simple read

TikTok Shares Your Data More Than Any Other Social Media App, Study Says

According to a recent study YouTube and TikTok track users' personal data more than any other social media apps. However, while YouTube mostly collects your personal data for its own purposes to serve you more relevant ads, TikTok mostly allows third-party trackers to collect your data -- "and from there, it's hard to say what happens with it," reports CNBC.


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