IT Glossary
What is a cookie?
Small files left by websites in a visitor's browser — the memory of the web: baskets kept, sessions held, behaviour measured.
The web is amnesiac by construction. Every page request is a fresh conversation, and cookies are its memory prosthesis: small files a site leaves in the visitor's browser so it recognises them at the next step. Thanks to cookies you stay logged in, the shopping basket survives navigation and the site remembers the language you chose. Through those same cookies, however, the advertising industry tracked users from one site to another for years, which is where the entire legal debate comes from. For your company's website the operational distinction is simple: strictly necessary cookies for sessions, baskets and security require nobody's agreement, while analytics and marketing cookies require prior, genuine consent. A banner that merely announces that cookies are in use, with no way to refuse, is non-compliant, and refusing must be as easy as accepting. Meanwhile browsers are gradually burying third-party cookies and marketing is shifting to first-party data — one more reason to make a direct relationship with your customers, through accounts, newsletters and your own purchase history, a strategic priority.
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Why it matters for your business
A functional experience for customers
Sessions that do not drop, baskets that wait and preferences that are remembered — the baseline comfort visitors simply assume is there.
Measurement of what actually works
With consent, analytics cookies show where customers come from and which pages persuade them — the fuel for every marketing decision you make.
Compliance without fines
A correct banner — accept and refuse equally simple, scripts blocked before agreement — meets the requirements that supervisory authorities actually check.
Frequently asked questions
What must a cookie banner do to be lawful?
Three things: block non-essential cookies until consent is given, offer refusal as visibly as acceptance, and keep a record of the choices. A decorative banner that merely informs while the scripts are already running is exactly what regulators penalise.
Does my simple brochure website need a banner?
If it uses only strictly necessary cookies, no. But almost every site today has analytics or marketing pixels installed out of habit. Take a real inventory of your cookies first and then decide — you may find you can stay elegantly banner-free by dropping what you never look at anyway.
What does the disappearance of third-party cookies mean for my company?
Cross-site tracking becomes progressively harder, so advertising targeted on that data weakens, and whoever owns first-party data wins: customer accounts, newsletter subscribers, purchase history. Strategically, invest in the direct relationship rather than renting access to a platform's data.
Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247