Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
Why cookies alerts are redundant
Cookies are small pieces of data sent from a website and stored to your browser while you browse a website. They can store information such as when you logged in to a site or the things you wrote on a form. For instance when you comment a blog post on this site your name, website url and email address are stored to a cookie so you won't have to fill them in every time you write a new comment.
Cookies cannot carry viruses or install malware to your computer so using them is in that way quite safe. You can also turn the usage of cookies off of your browser, though this will make using many websites quite difficult if not in many ways impossible for you.
Nowadays, due to some laws and regulations, many websites warn their users of the fact that they use cookies. I think these alerts are totally redundant.
Scaring the uninformed
First of all the cookie alert may scare someone who is not that familiar with the technology behind websites or who uses web very little. For a user like this a warning text telling "this website uses cookies" doesn't give much information on what's going on and will only make them scared about using web in general.
Especially when the news are filled with stories about people getting their different accounts hacked or giving out their bank information or getting viruses and malware to their computers, a warning about cookies is likely to send them running away.
Annoying the informed
Those who know a little something of how websites work and are more or less familiar with cookies tend to get annoyed by these alerts. Many times I have witnessed people complaining about these warnings or pointing out how silly they are.
Us who understand the usage of cookies and even have our own sites that use them can't understand the real benefit for these warning texts. They only create distraction to the site, not inform about anything new. Because...
Cookies are everywhere
More and more websites are built with content management systems such as WordPress or Drupal. They pretty much require the usage of cookies, because without them staying logged into the administration is impossible.
Websites with advertisement may (or may not) use cookies to serve the "right" advertisement to the users. For instance Google AdSense uses cookies to make sure you won't keep seeing same ads all over and over again and so forth.
Statistics are quite important for websites. With analyzing them a website owner can find out how many people visit the site, what kind of content and layout works and what doesn't, when the website traffic is most active and much more. To get this information cookies are important. For example Google Analytics is quite common service for tracking website traffic and usage and to collect the anonymous information it uses cookies.
Yes, the cookies alerts are redundant
Warning the user about usage of cookies is redundant. It doesn't give enough information for uninformed ones and informed ones are likely to scoff at them.
Most websites use cookies for different reasons, such as to keep their users logged in as long as they want, to help the users so they don't have to refill certain information on certain types of forms, to serve advertisement and to get usage statistics. For many sites cookies are essential. Therefore it's safe to assume any site you visit uses cookies.
Of course it is also important that people who use websites learn how these cookies can and may be used by different sites. It's also important that they learn how they can disable the cookies (when it's not necessary) and to understand how the disabling cookies can affect their experience of web. This however is not going to be accomplished with these alerts that seem to pop up all over the web.
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