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Author: Marta Peirano
Photo Credit: Domen Pal / Aksioma
At 28, it was a relic of the old world, the cookie. In a world of planetary-scale surveillance by digital platforms and defence contractors, of spy-as-a-service products like Pegasus and supply chain hit jobs like the SolarWinds cyberattack, the cookie felt insignificant, harmless, even cute, and on its way out. Its inconspicuous existence is, of course, its biggest asset.
Cookies are the building blocks of the digital exploitation industry, its original seed and the insidious troopers in its ever-growing army. And they are a sickness, a microbe that infected the Internet with a hunger that gradually slowed it down.
Cookies track you when you browse. They’re pesky little chunks of code that get stuck in your browser when you visit a website. In the beginning, they were just meant to help the digital shopkeepers remember your name when you entered their establishment and show you the kind of pickles you liked most. Which is nice. Then they started collecting more and more data and a hunger was born.
“Before cookies, the Web was essentially private”, Lawrence Lessig told t...
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