Can You Have Your Cookies and Eat (or Delete) Them, Too?

• Pages: 2-3
• Date: 01 October 2022
• Author: John M. McNichols
• Subject Matter: Civil Law

By John M. McNichols, Litigation Ne ws Associate Editor

Can You Have Your Cookies and Eat

(or Delete) Them, Too?

device. Although there is presently no federal law in the

United States analogous to the EU’s General Data Protection

Regulation (GDPR), contemplated legislation—such as the

pending Do Not Track Act of 2019—would similarly limit

the abilities of businesses to track consumer behavior through

the use of cookies. Regardless of the legislation, some private

businesses have already discontinued using cookies on a vol-

untary basis, raising the question of whether additional legis-

lation—let alone legislation at the federal level—is needed.

How Do Cookies Work?

In the early days of the internet, web designers were faced

with the problem of needing to preserve transaction infor-

mation from one internet screen to the next in order to save

users the trouble of reentering the information with each new

click. Cookies emerged as a solution to this problem, with

designers preferring to store such “stateful” information on

the user’s device rather than on the website’s server, thereby

conserving data storage space for the website. The term

“cookie” is an homage to the fortune cookie of restaurant

© Getty Image s

ntil recently, a “cookie” was just a popular

baked treat commonly consumed with milk.

Since the dawn of the internet, however, the term

has taken on a different meaning, namely that of

a small text le that is automatically stored on a

user’s web browser when viewing a particular website.

Although initially intended as a means to track trans-

action-specic information for short periods—such as the

items in an online shopping cart—there is nothing inher-

ent in the technology that limits a cookie to mere transitory

use. Cookies can remain on a user’s computer for weeks or

months and, in doing so, can enable the long-term tracking of

the user’s internet browsing activity. This capability is of great

commercial value to advertisers, but the fact that advertisers

might be able to determine all the websites that one has vis-

ited in the previous month—or even the previous year—has

drawn attention from certain regulators and lawmakers.

European law now requires that all websites targeting

users in European Union (EU) countries must gain “informed

consent” before storing “non-essential” cookies on a user’s

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