Beyond even this, there are the cookies, those little lines of software code that follow you around the Internet once you visit a website or click on a web ad. Cookies were first developed by Netscape’s Lou Montulli and included in the first versions of the Navigator browser. Cookies were originally intended to add “memory” to the web, allowing users to remain logged in to sites and to refresh content so that they wouldn’t be served the same thing every time they returned.24 But publishers like HotWired latched on to this technology as a way to deliver targeted ads to specific audiences. What
...more
