Apple is cutting down on how many cookies advertisers can force on to your devices, with changes coming to iPhones, iPads and Macs.
The cookie has humble origins, as a small file that a website could drop on a user’s computer when it needed to remember something specific about them.
That could be the contents of a shopping trolley, or the username they used to log in last time they visited the website.
But as the web became more complex, so did the uses of cookies.
This is what Apple is beginning to block with its latest update, and it has caused an almighty freakout from advertisers, who called the move “sabotage” in an open letter.
But this is an arms race, and cookies are just one battlefield.
Those are all subsets of the broader field of “fingerprinting”, which allows advertisers to go far beyond simple cookies in tracking a given user around the web. »