Browsing the internet, you are likely to have come across cookies.

Cookies are “non-edible” pieces of code that are stored in a person’s web browser when they access 99.99% of websites.

In 2009, the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) announced a new law to force website owners to ask website users for permission to place cookies on their computers. Though the law came into play in 2011, the ICO advised that website owners would have 12 months to modify their websites in order to become compliant.

Cookies form an essential part of a web user’s experience. They vastly speed up web browsing, making logging into accounts and accessing wish-lists far quicker. Cookies are good for both parties, the website owner and the website user, yet the new law proposed to significantly affect the way the internet operates by interrupting browser experience. The result of this was that most website owners chose not to comply.

On the day before the law was due to be enforced, the ICO changed the guidelines to suggest that consent could be implied and a permission checkbox didn’t need to be present, so all the fuss was over nothing. In fact, in 2013 the ICO removed explicitly asking for consent from their own website, which essentially gave everybody else the green light follow suit.

There are many different types of website cookies. In advertising, cookies remember your search terms and populate advertising space with products and services that you have already searched for or previously viewed.

You’ll be familiar with looking at a product online and then on other websites you visit that product follows you. It is easy to take offence with a company when they start to bug you with advertising everywhere you go!

All of this has led to website users becoming very wary of cookies; it is now easier for users to switch them off.

As a result of this technology, companies have been looking for an alternative, one that enables users to be more in control of the advertising they see, what companies know about them but also importantly one that users can’t turn off.

One of these concepts is user fingerprinting, which allows a website to look at the user’s computer (e.g. what software and plugins are installed, device type and time zone) and create a profile based on the details found.

Browsers transmit all manner of information which can be put together to form a unique identity, this can then be used for advertising and be much harder to shake off than a cookie. Companies can use fingerprinting combined with email records to target advertising based on a wider profile than just your search history.

So, even though the cookie law was a farce, the irony is an arguably more prohibitive means of tracking is being developed for use by online advertisers and you won’t be surprised to hear that it is Google that are leading this development process.