Why Cookies are bad for your digital well-being

Tracking cookies are used to track us on the Internet and to display personalized advertising. In this article you will find out why this is not only annoying, but can even be harmful to our digital health.

It’s Monday morning. While you’re drinking your first cup of coffee, you check your emails to see if anything is new. On the subway ride on your way to work, you scroll through your Twitter feed, scanning the latest news. When you order a latte at your favorite coffee shop, you can’t help but upload a photo to Instagram. Later, during your lunch break, you get an email about a discount deal from your favorite online store, so you check out the shoes you’ve had your eye on for a while. And when you finally relax on your couch, after a long day at work, you click your way through the latest movie recommendations from your friends. Your constant companion throughout the day? The internet. 

Around 79% of Americans use the internet several times per a day, while 31% say they are constantly online. During the pandemic, this trend has dramatically increased as our daily activities are shifting further into the digital space. We send private messages to our friends, shop and work online and access entertainment platforms to watch movies or listen to music.

Ever get the feeling you’re being watched?

While you are innocently engaging in these activities, behind the scenes someone is watching your every click. The websites you view, how long you viewed them and how you ended up there: all these little crumbs of data leave a digital trail across the internet. That data is stored and processed by Big Tech to create a personalized profile of you and target you with advertising. 

Ever wondered why the ads that you see match your recently viewed items or websites? We know we’ve been creeped out by it. That’s the result of retargeting: advertisers and marketers try to capture your attention for a specific item over and over again – until you finally make that purchase.

Almost all free online services use advertising on their sites. In return for using the service for free, you are served one ad after another. According to marketing experts, Internet users in the U.S. see between 4,000-10,000 such ads every day. All of them are as personalized as possible to increase the chances that you will make that final click. But being a constant target of such manipulative strategies can have a negative impact on our well-being.

One Cookie is never enough

These practices are made possible through the use of cookies. And while most people know that their website activities leave behind a cookie trail on the internet, few are aware of the extent of the problem.

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your system when you first visit a website to store your preferences. Third-party cookies, also called tracking cookies, go one step further: these cookies belong to a third-party advertising network or website and are placed in the background of the site you are currently viewing. While you can’t see who’s lurking, they can track your browsing activity across multiple websites and bombard you with targeted ads.

If you are one of those people who always agree to all cookies, you can expect that a variety of advertising networks, many of which you’ve never heard of, will eventually know you better than you know yourself. The problem is that it’s almost impossible to avoid cookies anymore: According to research, 87 percent of the world’s most popular web domains engage in digital tracking. Recent figures show that 12.4 first- and third-party cookies are placed on the average website. Around 3.9 of this personal data is on average forwarded to third-parties.

When you sign up for a platform like Facebook, for example, you give them permission to see everything you do on that network. This data, combined with the information already collected from your other browsing activities, provides Big Tech with a pretty good insight into who you are. (And they know much more about you than you think they do.)

 With all of this going on, it’s good to consider the havoc that online tracking and personalized advertising is wreaking on our digital well-being.

Why cookies are bad for your well-being

Let’s imagine this practice were to take place in real life: You enter a store and a salesperson you’ve never met before greets you with your name and asks if you’re feeling a little bit better today than the day before. Also, he tells you to check out this new fragrance because you sure did enjoy the shampoo from a similar brand the other day, so it could be a great match. Sounds creepy? That’s because it is. In real life it’s likely that many of us would never enter that store again. But ironically, that’s exactly what happens to us over and over again whenever we browse the internet – yet we still keep doing it.

To many, the collection of online data might seem harmless at first, but it’s actually dangerous for our mental health. 

For one, psychology teaches us that even when we consciously reject certain adverts, they remain stuck in our subconscious, which increases the likelihood that we will buy the product at a later date. This phenomenon is called the “mere-exposure effect”: if we are repeatedly exposed to something, we start to view it in a more positive light. Therefore, advertising that is served to us again and again, manipulates our perception of things.

There are countless real-life examples that prove the negative impact personalized advertising and content can have on us. Not convinced yet? Here is a small selection:

• A few years ago, a supermarket chain disclosed the secret pregnancy of a young teenage girl before her own family was aware. After analyzing the young woman’s shopping behavior, the store had identified her as pregnant and started to send her corresponding advertising. When one of these pregnancy ads fell into the hands of her horrified father, more than just a few questions had to be answered at home.
• After suffering from a stillbirth, journalist Gillian Brockell tried to stop the constant ads for baby products that continued to be served to her based on her previous searches for baby content. The algorithm figured this meant she had already given birth and started to bombard her with ads for the best nursing bras and videos on how to get a baby to sleep through the night. For Gillian, her daily internet visits turned into a personal nightmare.
• Following her mother’s passing, Lindsay Robertson used Google search to help her with the organizational tasks at hand, including looking for gravestones. Immediately afterwards, corresponding ads start following her across the internet. Again and again, unwanted memories of the traumatic event are triggered, having a negative effect on her mental well-being.
• As early as 2017, Facebook was able to tell its advertisers when teenagers felt “insecure” and “worthless” and “need a confidence boost” – thus, when they are particularly vulnerable to advertising. In 2021, the company was accused of failing to adequately protect teens from content that glorifies eating disorders on its platform  Instagram. 
• Everything we do online leaves a data trail that reveals the most personal information about us. The TV documentary “Made to Measure” illustrates how precise these data profiles can be: A young woman’s entire life is reconstructed in great detail based on her search data, thereby revealing that invasive advertising negatively affected the protagonist’s mental state throughout her past five years.
• With the help of third-party tracking data, a Catholic news magazine was able to secretly track the location data and phone of a priest who was using the dating app Grindr. The data, probably obtained from an advertising partner of the app, also enabled them to see that he was frequently visiting gay bars. He was forced to step down from his job.

Fewer cookies, more well-being

As a result of the online cookie madness we experience a digital overload. Thousands of ads are incessantly following us around and reappearing everywhere. We are faced with endless opportunities to scroll through content, and become victims to recommendation algorithms displaying harmful content to us. No wonder our digital well-being is suffering.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Because there are alternative ways for businesses to thrive without using invasive advertising practices. Instead of using personalized targeting methods, ads can – and should be – served purely based on their context. That means, users are only shown ads based on the content they are searching for in that particular moment. Studies have actually shown that these types of ads are far more effective because they are more relevant to users. Still, a large number of companies still choose to use targeting techniques that are harmful to our well-being.

5 tips for more digital well-being

At the start of every new year, we jump on the opportunity to break with old habits and adopt a healthier lifestyle. So let’s transfer that sentiment to our digital lives. Let’s make the switch to alternative, less invasive online services and products that protect our data and digital health.

Here are a few small steps that can already make a big difference:

• Use alternatives that don’t rely on tracking cookies: For search, you can use Startpage, and browse the results with the Anonymous View feature. And if you use our private shopping feature for your online purchases, you won’t see the same promotional items follow you around everywhere afterwards. A secure email service prevents your data from being shared for tracking purposes. We recommend using StartMail.
• Cookies are everywhere: Learn to understand how cookies work and what purpose they serve. Remember that you don’t have to accept all cookies: By refusing non-essential cookies, you can prevent advertisers from following you around the web.
• Delete cookies on a regular basis. Sure, you can’t avoid all cookies, but you can limit how long they follow you around. Make sure to delete cookies from your browser regularly.
• Adjust the privacy settings of your social media accounts. You can already reduce a lot of data exchange between platform and advertisers by making a few small changes. 
• Review the apps and services you use: Where can you minimize usage and thus reduce the number of trackers and cookies you encounter?

At Startpage, we are committed to protecting your privacy not only when searching, but anywhere across the web. To protect you even further, our team has been working on a brand-new solution, which will be launched shortly. We can’t wait to share our newest privacy-protecting feature with you. Stay tuned for updates and follow us on social media, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our blog for the big announcement next week!