COOKIE MANAGEMENTEFFECT OF COOKIES ON YOUR PRIVACY

PRESENTED BY HARRIS MWASHALO

BUSINESS INFORMATION TECH & PRIVACY EVANGELIST

We all love cookies, right? What’s your favourite flavour?

Well, there’s one type of cookie that you won’t find in an oven

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile device by websites you

visit or certain emails you open. In essence a cookie notifies a website when you return. Think

of a cookie as a unique and personal identification card.

A tracking cookie at workTo illustrate a scenario of a cookie at work, picture this, you visit a website that

hosts online advertising from a third-party vendor. Consequently, as an advertiser on the site, that third party vendor has the ability to place a cookie on your computer. If they decide to place a cookie on your computer and you visit another website that also has advertisement from the same third-party

vendor, then that vendor will know you have visited both websites. Of course nothing malicious has occurred, but now the vendor is able to indirectly

determine all the sites you visit if they have cookies present on those sites. This is just one example; cookies can collect a variety of other information

Privacy rights come up when one attempts to keep records or use tracking device on other people They track behavioural information like the pages and content you look at, when and how often you visit, what you search

for, whether you clicked on an ad or link, geographic region, language preferences, and device features.

In this digital age we have become accustomed to targeted content. It’s just a matter of how much we want or do not want advertisers and

corporations to know about our Internet surfing habits and how much of this personalized behavioural advertising we want to see.

We are human beings, we are not 1000 likes on a web-page, but rather, one thousand people who are interested in a content.

Websites should provide consumers with information about what personal information they collect and how they’ll

use it.

Telecommunications companies like Safaricom collect customer information but they use it when it’s appropriate to their own service area

(CIO East Africa Article).

If otherwise, there are certain laws protecting the consumer from any harm.

To see how powerful cookies are visit: privacy.net

Further reading: cookiecentral.com

Why privacy matters – By Glenn

After all this intel, what are the solutions?

One of the immediate solutions is adjusting your browser settings (Firefox browser demo)

Third party cookies are considered to be underground cookies, which can be hard to regulate. Therefore, the Communications Commission of Kenya should

do something about this. The government should realize cookies invade the privacy of Kenyan citizens protected by the Kenyan constitution, as spelt out in

Article 32 section 36 (2)

SEC_RITY IS NOT COMPLETE WITHOUT ‘U’

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