Engage Rant Mode...
I'm talking about website cookies (they have zero calories!) I suppose for a lot of people they're invisible things that don't impact on their lives much from day to day... but do they? Cookies are what drives personalised adverts to your devices, they're what tracks your every action (depending on the device), for me they're a nonsense and irrelevant, and I really wish the Internet would change this so that the cookies lived server-side, or at least give us the option in some browser setting, or perhaps they are legally and strictly limited to login session maintenance only.
I tend to block a lot of these invisible cookies, especially the kind that do nothing but track stuff, I run my browser always in Privacy Mode (does not record history etc once the tab or window is closed), so when I close my web browser everything gets deleted - history, cache, cookies, the lot. Any websites that I was logged into get 'logged out', not because I logged out, but because their little cookies are all gone. Now one could argue that I bring this upon myself, but I say no - cookies were fine when they were only used to maintain a website login, but now they are far more insidious, who knows what things they get up to! Especially from the likes of Facebook and Google, two massive companies who make their fortunes on their user's data (case in point: Zuckerberg is currently very angry at Apple for implementing privacy measures on their iOS devices which effectively cripples Facebook's invasive tracking stuff, thereby kyboshing their shifty business model).
My solution? Keep these cookies server-side. What do most users expect from a cookie but for it to maintain their login session to a website? Nothing. So, the server knows who is logged in and on what device (every device has unique identifiers, no personal information should be required, no passwords, just the user id for the website in question), so store these few bytes of information on the server. People should take more interest and have more control over their devices and data by default.
It annoys me sometimes how little the internet has actually progressed in the last 20 years, I still blame Bill Gates for this!
Rant over.