NICEVILLE, Fla. — In this week’s edition of It’s Geek To Me, Jeff Werner explains what the different types of website cookies do and which ones you may want to allow or disable.
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QUESTION
Spouse Peripheral from Bluewater Bay asks:
I was recently looking at an online store that I had never visited before, and at the beginning of the process, a box came up that said, “Cookie Preference Center”. There was about a paragraph of jargon about providing the visitors with a customized and personalized experience. Here are the choices:
- Targeting Cookies
- Functional Cookies
- Performance Cookies
- Strictly Necessary Cookies
The website is one I receive emails from every day and was offering a Zoom class I was interested in. The class is over, but I can still watch it. What is this about, and which one should I choose?
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ANSWER
Jeff Werner responds:
Ah, yes, the ubiquitous internet welcome mat of the 2020s. You navigate to a shiny new webpage, hoping to read a simple article or look at a product, and before you can see a single pixel of actual content, you are slapped in the face by a massive pop-up window.
It demands your immediate compliance, says something vague about “your privacy is important to us,” then forces you to deal with a compliance dashboard that looks like it requires a degree in computer science to understand.
Don’t feel bad for being confused. That “paragraph of jargon” is written by corporate lawyers to satisfy international data privacy regulations like Europe’s GDPR and various state laws here in the U.S. As for that “Cookie Preference Center,” it is essentially a control panel for the tiny text files that the website wants to drop onto your computer’s hard drive.
To clear up the confusion, let’s peel back the corporate-speak and break down exactly what those four main categories of cookies are actually doing behind the scenes.
1, Strictly Necessary Cookies: Think of these as the structural engineering of the website. Without them, the webpage literally cannot function. If you turn these off, the site breaks down entirely, which is why the “Preference Center” won’t even give you a switch to disable them.
What do they do? Let’s say you are doing some online shopping. Every time you click “Add to Cart” and move to a new page to keep browsing, the website needs a way to remember that you put that item in your basket.
Because the basic architecture of the web is “stateless”—meaning a site forgets who you are the second you click a new link—Strictly Necessary cookies act as a temporary memory. They also handle secure logins and make sure the website doesn’t crash when thousands of people visit at the same time.
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2. Functional (Preferences) Cookies: If “necessary” cookies keep the lights on, functional cookies remember how you like the furniture arranged. These are entirely focused on improving your user experience based on choices you have actively made in the past.
If you change a website’s theme from blinding white to “Dark Mode,” a functional cookie remembers that choice so you don’t burn your retinas out the next time you open the site.
If you select “Spanish” as your preferred language, or set your weather app to show Fahrenheit instead of Celsius, a functional cookie stores that preference. Disabling these won’t break the website, but it means you will have to reset your preferences every single time you visit.
3. Performance (Analytics) Cookies: These cookies aren’t looking at who you are; they are looking at what you do. They gather completely anonymous telemetry data about how people move through the website.
Website owners use tools like Google Analytics to see which of their articles are popular, how long people stay on a page, and—critically—which links are broken.
If a button on a webpage is broken and spitting out an ugly “404 Page Not Found” error, performance cookies log that error so the web developer knows they need to fix it. Turning these off won’t hurt your browsing experience at all, but it does leave the website managers in the dark about how to make their site run faster and smoother.
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4. Targeting (Marketing) Cookies: Now we get to the real culprit behind why these pop-up banners exist in the first place. Targeting cookies are the digital bloodhounds of the internet. They are rarely owned by the website you are actually looking at; instead, they belong to third-party advertising networks like Google, Meta, or various data brokers.
Have you ever searched for a specific brand of running shoes on one site, only to be haunted by advertisements for those exact shoes on every other unrelated website you visit for the next two weeks?
You can thank targeting cookies for that. They track your digital footprints across the web, build a psychological profile of your shopping habits, and serve up ads tailored specifically to you.
The Geek’s Recommendation: When you encounter these “Preference Centers,” my advice is simple: Turn off Targeting Cookies immediately. You lose absolutely nothing by disabling them except for some eerily accurate advertisements.
If you value your privacy, you can also leave Performance Cookies off. Keep Functional Cookies turned on if it’s a site you plan to visit often and want it to remember your personalizations, and leave Strictly Necessary alone because you don’t have a choice anyway.
If you want to bypass these annoying pop-ups entirely, modern browsers like Brave, or privacy extensions like uBlock Origin for Chrome and Firefox, can automatically block these banners and the cookies hiding behind them.
To view additional content, comment on articles, or submit a question, visit my website at ItsGeekToMe.co.
Jeff Werner, a software engineer based in Niceville, Florida, has been writing his popular “It’s Geek to Me” tech column since 2007. He shares his expertise to help readers solve everyday tech challenges.
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