How does Amazon and Flipkart use our cookies to target adds at US

Imagine that you have gone to a book shop and you short of liked a book. But decided not to buy it due to its unreasonable price or its average quality. But after leaving the shop you can see advertisements about that book anywhere you go. And as a result, you will get influenced and buy the book. But originally you didn’t want to buy the book.   

Aren’t most of you reading this article familiar with this story as it always happens with us on the web. So how does the websites target advertisements based on our preferences? The simple answer is that they use cookies.

What are Cookies? Cookies are small files contenting our information based on our surfing on the internet saved by our browsers and the websites we visit. So, when we search for a book on Amazon, it saves the cookies contenting the info that I have searched for a book.

But how does it target adds to any website we surf to on the internet? Most of the websites on the internet use google AdSense to put adds on their websites. So, Amazon simply sells the cookies to google and then Google’s algorithm targets the adds based on our cookies. 

So, is it legal to do it? Unfortunately, yes, it is completely legal as we ourselves allow the websites, browsers and our phones to collect and sell the cookies to any company they want to sell it to.

How can we stop this from happening? It is very simple to stop this from happening, we can just stop this by disabling the options on our phones and browsers which allow the cookies to be shared with anyone. 

So please tell me by commenting what you think about the current situation of information selling by tech giants to exploit us and fill their pockets.