tech
Whenever a website keeps you logged in or remembers what's in your shopping cart, something quietly tucked away on your own device is doing the remembering — and it can even let companies follow you from site to site.
A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to store, containing information like a session ID or shopping cart contents, which the site reads again on your next visit to maintain a consistent experience. Because cookies persist between visits, they let a site remember you without requiring login on every page, but this same persistence makes them useful for advertisers to track behavior across websites.
A cookie is not a virus, since it's passive stored data with no ability to execute code or spread on its own, and it's unrelated to search engines, an entirely separate system for finding information.
Growing privacy concerns over cross-site tracking cookies have pushed browsers and regulators to restrict or phase them out, driving the advertising industry toward more privacy-conscious ways of understanding users.
tech
In AI language models, what is a "token"?What does the "GPT" in ChatGPT stand for?What makes an "AI agent" fundamentally different from such a chatbot?What is "machine learning"?What does it mean for software to be "open source"?What is a "blockchain," in simple terms?What is "the cloud" in cloud computing?A "neural network" in AI is loosely modeled on what?What does an "NFT" represent?In software, what is an "API"?What does the "Turing test" measure?What is "computer vision"?Quration — Quration Play