Have you ever shopped for something online and then, moments later, found yourself inundated with ads for an eerily similar product? These are third-party cookies (tiny invisible bits of ad-tracking code that record our activity) in action. But the cookie was originally meant to facilitate shopping and browsing. It was not meant to replace first-party customer data or be the basis of an increasingly arcane and intrusive online advertising industry.
It turns out that as much as we....