Ahh, cookies — those annoying pop-ups that come up when you enter every website. How do you deal with them? Are you the type of person who accepts them unconditionally? Or do you try to find the “reject all cookies” button companies desperately try to hide? In an age of increasing digitization, cookies serve as the doorway into a long journey of online tracking, throwing off our online presence of privacy into a vulnerable position.

Web cookies were invented during the 1990s to address websites’ problem with having to store temporary data on user computers, thereby decreasing the server’s overhead and costs. When a website uses cookies, it can remember your every visit even after closing your browser. The use of cookies quickly spread across the World Wide Web, as they allowed websites to do more by maintaining continuity between sessions, such as the “Remember Me” option. Meanwhile, internet advertising companies figured out an alternative way to use them via storing a unique identifier in each user's browser. Then, each time these users visit a new website, advertisers can determine who they are with full certainty by reading the unique identifier stored in the cookie. Over time, this tracking potential of cookies gained public attention. Governments have passed laws to prevent tracking without user consent. This, however, didn't stop tracking in the digital world. Although the tracking capabilities of cookies faced increased legal restrictions, the methods of tracking became even more intricate. New methods like browser fingerprinting, which tracks users based on the unique properties of their computers, became more widespread. In the current day, any device with internet capabilities may collect and send your data to third parties. It started with your web browsers and now includes mobile apps, cars, doorbells, and even smart thermometers.

Today, most digital services require you to provide data for processing. Phone keyboards need to record your words and sentences to perform auto-completion; maps need constant location data to provide traffic information; social media apps need to know your personality and likes to show you videos that you would enjoy; shopping websites need to know your consumer habits to recommend you just the right product.

If you are one of those people who does not use ad-blockers while surfing the internet, have you ever questioned how those ads are tracked towards you, even though you enter websites that have no connection with each other whatsoever? For this one, you have Google to thank for. You probably use their calendar, mail, to-do lists, maps, and all the other free services they provide. While apps might appear to be free, the hidden price is your data.

But why are we allowing these companies to collect our data and breach our privacy every day? Convenience. Giving your data to these companies enables them to sell it to third parties for money while offering you convenience as a price for the data. Isn’t it convenient that the company that provides all these services for free also happens to be the biggest advertiser on the internet? In the end, Google earns 77 percent of its total revenue from advertisements alone.

Privacy is freedom. Prisoners would not be entitled to privacy in their cells, just as they would not be entitled to freedom. Privacy is a concept so essential to our lives in the 21st century, but it is also just as easy for us to lose it. As dependence on technology increases, our data will get less and less private until we won't have any choice but to share everything with digital overseers. This is a problem, even if you have “nothing to hide, nothing to fear.” When spectators of our lives are hidden behind silicon chips and colorful screens, it is hard for us to comprehend the magnitude of the situation. Imagine a random person who follows you everywhere, knows where you are at all times, and watches your every activity. He knows what you like to eat, what your hobbies are, and who your friends are and tracks them as well. You know that you are being watched, but you have no idea who he is. Your tracker knows everything about you but you know nothing about them. This is the personification of the current state of privacy in our lives. There exists something behind all those apps and devices, either a person or an algorithm, that collects all the things about you, meanwhile, you are oblivious to any information about them.

So, how can you be protected? How can you block your secrets from being transferred by fiber-optic highways under the ground? The solution is not simple. It requires fundamental digital lifestyle changes, beginning with the discontinued use of all those convenient apps, calendars, and cloud solutions. Unfortunately, most of the time, privacy-respecting alternatives are much harder to set up and use. Even for a lot of tech-savvy people, it demands too much effort. For people who have not yet acquired a high level of digital literacy, the barrier to accessing these alternatives is simply too high — it requires sophisticated knowledge about the underlying technologies and how they work.

Even if you completely abandon privacy-invasive technologies in your life, in the end, other people or institutions might tie you back to them. Your workspace or school might require you to use data-collecting platforms. Your data might be copied to random places or uploaded to random websites without your knowledge. Social bonds may bind you back to messaging and social media apps. Either you'll comply with their invasive privacy policies or be socially ostracized from the rest. In reality, very few of us are ready to do all this. What we often do instead is to fear for a moment and forget about it so that we can continue living our lives with convenience.

As pessimistic as the current state of privacy may seem, taking any precaution is still much better than no precautions. Currently, there exists no way for you to protect your privacy with 100% certainty. However, awareness about it is the first step, and starting with finding the “reject all cookies” button under those crowded menus might be a good idea.