The EU’s landmark privacy law, GDPR, was one of the best things to happen to the internet for a very long time. But it also came with one of the most annoying things on the web: a never-ending series of pop-ups asking us to make cookie choices …
A quick recap on GDPR
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force back in 2018, offering the strongest tech privacy protections ever seen. Even better, although the law only applied to EU citizens, many tech giants decided it was easier to comply globally, so everyone benefited. This was true of Apple, for example.
You can read our full summary here, but the core of it is four restrictions on the collection, storage, and processing of our personal data:
There must be a specific, lawful reason to process the data
Personal data must be encrypted
You have a right to a copy of your data
You can ask for your data to be deleted
The problem with cookies
Cookies are small text files that can be saved to our devices to enable websites to do things like track whether we have visited the site before, and whether we have been exposed to a banner ad for that site.
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