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Mini-review: Cookie Cookie, the iOS app you’ll only open once but appreciate daily

FT Cookie Policy Screen

Cookies have a bad rap, with assorted non-techies describing them as ‘tracking your web activities,’ as if they somehow enabled someone to sit and watch what you do. The reality, of course, is that the most they can ever do in the way of tracking is note that you saw an ad on one website and later visited the online store to buy the product. Mostly what cookies do is simply recognize who we are when we return to a website – and they are easy to block if we really want to.

But the mainstream media got carried away, politicians got involved and it became law in Europe that any website using cookies had to inform visitors with a message that had to be actively dismissed. Most U.S. sites erred on the side of caution by following suit, subjecting almost all of us to pointless and annoying notices.

Cookie Cookie is an iOS app that does one thing and one thing only: does its level best to hide all cookie notices. You’ll only ever need to interact with it once. Open the app, then go into Settings > Safari > Content Blockers to allow it to run – and you’re done.

It can’t work perfectly, as there is no 100% reliable method for detecting cookies, so the app searches for them by name. More precisely, it uses CSS queries to look for HTML elements containing the most commonly-used names: cookie-notice, cPolicy, cconsent and so on. When it finds one of these, it hides the HTML element. The result is a web largely free from annoying messages you have to dismiss to get on with your day. In a few days of using it, I’ve found it blocked almost all of them.

So long as the app is open in the background, it will sit there silently doing its job on both iPhone and iPad. Cookie Cookie costs $0.99 from iTunes, but we have a few giveaway codes you can use – when you use one, please paste the code you used into comments afterwards so people can see it’s gone.

NFMEAW37TJLX
TH34PPJTE6WA
T37R3MXYFNNA
KYYYRYNJ9PNW
HL4RJE6RN6HA
HRLW9A3LR3T4
3M4T3KE6L9FA
HPLYJPFPH69M
PH9T7TE6JLMN

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Comments

  1. Joost - 8 years ago

    3M4T3KE6L9FA used it! Lets try it, looks cool.

  2. Looks like most of them have already been redeemed.

  3. Sven Spreen Brouwer - 8 years ago

    Great article! I’m going to try this wonderful app! Thanks for the giveaway code! I used NFMEAW37TJLX

  4. David Wood - 8 years ago

    All codes used, thanks for commenting and letting us know, jerks. :-)

  5. Jack Hawley - 8 years ago

    HPLYJPFPH69M

  6. Never seen an active cookie policy come up on any web site ever.

    Cookies are simple to describe – persistent storage created and controlled by a web site on your local computer able to store almost any data the web site wishes to put there.

  7. Just add a CSS override to one of the blocker apps that allows custom CSS to do the same thing. Charging for CSS overrides? Damn.

  8. Graham J - 8 years ago

    “the most they can ever do in the way of tracking is note that you saw an ad on one website and later visited the online store to buy the product.”

    This is not an accurate description of cookies. Cookies are a chunk of data placed in your browser by a web server. They are then sent back to that server whenever a resource on the same website is requested in the future. They are often used to allow sites to recognize authenticated users by storing a token but the problem comes when a great deal of websites request resources from a common server. In that case the server can track your web browsing across sites.

    An example of this is Google’s ad servers and Facebook and other popular sites’ widgets. Both of these companies are able to track your usage of the hundreds of thousands of sites that use them.

    Removing the notices aren’t the solution – blocking third party cookies is. Or better yet, blocking all by default and whitelisting ones you need.

Author

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Ben Lovejoy

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!


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