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Planet Money

How the cookie became a monster

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.629.8K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2022

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

30 years ago, Lou Montulli set out to solve a fundamental problem with the internet, and accidentally created an entirely different one. On today's show, how the cookie went from an obscure piece of code designed to protect anonymity, to an online advertiser's dream, to a privacy advocate's nightmare.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This is Planet Money from NPR.

0:03.6

Whenever Lume on Tule goes online, he just like the rest of us gets weirdly specific ads.

0:13.4

What's the strangest thing that you maybe casually looked up on the internet that seems

0:17.3

to follow you everywhere as an ad no matter what website you go to?

0:23.0

gutter protection.

0:24.0

You look that up one time and you just get bombarded and I actually did buy gutter

0:29.8

protection and they just kept advertising to me for seemingly forever.

0:33.3

Does any part of you think like I kind of did this to myself?

0:37.7

Uh, yeah I do feel somewhat responsible for the state of the world.

0:44.2

Lume on Tule is kind of responsible for the state of the world, at least the online world.

0:50.1

I'm the inventor of the internet cookie.

0:52.8

The internet cookie.

0:54.8

So you know when you go to a new site you usually have to like accept the cookies or reject

0:59.3

the cookies.

1:00.3

Yeah, those are the cookies that Lume made people go, oh you're the reason I have to keep

1:04.7

clicking cancel all the time.

1:06.9

So you may have a vague sense that cookies play some nefarious role in online tracking.

1:13.2

But cookies do a lot of things cookies allow you to sign into a website.

1:17.3

They're what allows you to comment on stuff online.

1:20.8

And yes, cookies are also the thing that lets advertisers follow you around the internet

1:26.7

to serve you that same gutter protection ad everywhere you go.

1:31.1

The strange thing about the cookie is that when Lume first cooked it up an internet lifetime

...

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