Okay. Since this is a digital marketing blog, you know that I’m not talking about those lovely biscuits that you buy from Mrs. Fields. What I am talking about are the annoying little things that websites attach to your web browser after you interact with certain elements of web pages. The big question is, are they ethical??

Cookies are now often used by marketers as a method of doing targeted digital marketing based on what you view in the past.

For example, a couple weeks back, I spent a good part of a couple days searching for a new camera. I returned to a specific photography website several times during those couple days, and soon after, on every social media site and Google search I conducted, the sidebars would be blanketed by the latest camera deals from different websites. These would follow me everywhere I went, until I cleaned out my cookies on my browser.

Its quite creepy what digital marketing can do nowadays, and even when we are leisurely browsing different places, we are often still bombarded with marketing. I believe that it would be alright for marketers to do so, but options for consumers to opt out of the marketing should be made more prominent. Though most consumers today are tech savvy, its definitely complicated to educate people on how to get rid of cookies. So as marketers, lets all tone it down a notch, so we don’t ruin the word “cookies” for future generations eh?