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My cousin's 15 year old kid talked me into disabling my browser cookies
I was at a family BBQ last Sunday and my cousin's kid, who is obsessed with cybersecurity, saw me pull up YouTube on my laptop and asked if I ever bothered to check my cookie settings. He showed me how many trackers were loaded from just one video, like over 30 different companies following me around the web. Has anyone else had a younger relative or friend call them out on basic privacy stuff, and did it actually make you change your habits?
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michaelgrant1mo ago
People don't realize how much of their online life is just being tracked and sold to advertisers, it's like walking around a store with a sign on your back listing everything you've ever searched for. Once you start paying attention to cookie popups and tracker blockers, you see the same pattern everywhere from shopping sites to news articles. It makes you wonder why we all just accepted this as normal in the first place.
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adams.uma1mo ago
Wait, is this the new version of "the kids teaching the adults how to use the remote"? Because I feel like I just got schooled by a teenager who probably still needs a parent to buy his video games. My nephew did the same thing to me last year - showed me that my browser had enough tracking cookies to bake a whole bakery's worth of treats, and now I can't even look at a pair of sneakers without getting ads for them for the next three months. It's like the internet decided to turn my shopping history into a public bulletin board, and somehow I was the last person to notice.
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