From Mozilla and the team at Rally, this is Rally Round. It’s a newsletter for the community we’re building here — a community rooted in the idea that data about people and their digital lives should benefit those people, not just the big-tech players who know how to mine it.
Rally Round #4 | All For Cookies
In our previous Rally Rounds, we discussed how you feel about data and stories we’ve made with Rally partners. In this issue, we want to start explaining who is involved in collecting data about you and how the data is collected. Data is a form of conversation, and to communicate well, you need to be fluent in the language. We’re trying to make some key meanings clearer so you better understand what you’re consenting to in terms of service from Rally and other brokers.
Right now, the motivation for most data collection is selling: selling you stuff (tangible or not) or selling your data and/or profile to others who want to sell you stuff. For web users, this is most visible in the ads you see online; your data drives the ad spaces sold to vendors, increases the chances that the ads you are shown are things you are likely to buy, and creates metrics to prove the results were worth the investment. Figuring out how to make you buy things based on ads you see is targeting. Ad agencies, platforms, and vendors depend on targeting for the entire online ad ecosystem. Better ads and better-placed copy are optimized for the highest return, the most money or value.
Let’s focus on the festive jargon of web data collection: cookies and parties. We’re going to start with cookies because they’re one of the best known methods of data tracking and collection. Cookies are small text files that, once installed, flag data that later allows website owners to collect it. The term is apt: cookies result in a sort of recipe of your habits, purchases, and tastes. If someone has your specific recipe, they can recreate your tastes, recommend new flavors, or adjust their recipes to fit you. Cookies aren’t the only way to follow your habits across the web but they are a lot fancier than they used to be. Terms of service usually give a lot of web cookies’ power to companies, not to you, and cookies get shared between parties.
If you read your average terms of service closely, you will see phrases like “the party of the first” and “the party of the second.” You are the first party in this legal document. The second party is the website that you are visiting. Third parties are anybody else that the second party invites into the relationship. Third parties can be big and messy. They include companies that provide services to the website, like serving ads and helping the website understand what kinds of customers they have.
Cookie parties are different than the legal parties we just described, and there are only two kinds: first party cookies and third party cookies. First party cookies are between you and the website you’re using. These cookies track things that are important for you to be able to use a website, like whether you’re logged in to your favorite cartoon fan site or not. Third party cookies are information about you, tracked by a third party (legal definition) that has access to the website. You may not be explicitly aware of this relationship. These cookies are used to identify and track you — and remember what you did, not only on the cartoon fan site, but potentially across all the websites you visit.
So if you are on that cartoon fan site, a first party cookie only covers your behavior on that site, and the website only uses it for their business needs. A third party cookie — for example, one installed by a marketing company to see your behavior on the cartoon fan site — may also be able to see your behaviors on other websites if that marketing company has third party cookies on those other sites. If you purchased a t-shirt of your favorite character, booked a hotel for an animation convention, or browsed a cosplay costuming site, the marketing company can use data flagged by their third party cookies to create a recipe of you as a “fan” and show you ads on the cartoon fan site — or a completely unrelated site.
It sounds relatively harmless and maybe even beneficial, helping you find a t-shirt design you love, based on your browsing. The problem (which we’ll explain in more detail in our next newsletter) is that you are not usually asked or informed that this is happening, so you have no idea who is sampling or recreating your specific recipe, and to what end. Edible cookie recipes are often deeply personal, containing sense memories, preferences, and secret ingredients. Internet cookies help gather that kind of information, too – but you didn’t write out a copy of your auntie’s recipe for brownies and give it to your best friend. Someone took it from your browser history and used it to make money.
What kind of internet does that help cook up for you?
In the next issue of Rally Round, we’ll talk about why cookies and parties are changing (spoilers: not for the better), and how Rally is helping to fight back. In the meantime, we know the best parties arise from many connections with like-minded people and diverse experiences. (Chocolate chip cookies are awesome, but they aren’t the only cookie.) We can help build better recipes for data and find new favorites, together – and for that we need more people at this Rally party!
So if you haven’t joined us yet, please consider this your formal invitation. We’re now on Firefox and Chrome; just go to our homepage and click the black “install Rally” button on the upper right.
‘Til then, have a cookie! A real one, not the tracker kind.
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Special Edition of “Rally is Reading”…The Rally Crew’s Favorite (Real) Cookie Recipes
After doing all that explanation about data and cookies and parties, our brains are a little… baked. And we’re hungry. So we’re gonna make some non-data tracking cookies and thought we’d share our favorite recipes so you can, too!
Blue-Ribbon Chocolate Chip Cookies (Mrs. Fields)
Vegan Lemon Meltaways (Karielyn Tillman)
Ultimate Sugar Cookies (Bon Appétit)