Yes, you’re spot on; it’s mostly about elements and functionality not working. Just as a heads up, I work in the WordPress ecosystem so the following brief descriptions will be focused on PHP based sites. I’m sure there are ways round using cookies, such as using localStorage in JavaScript etc. Anyway!
The biggest thing you’ll run into is anything to do with login systems. Any website that offers a login/account typically makes use of cookies, in order to let the website “remember” that you’re logged in, between page navigation.
One of our clients offers a comparison calculator for investments. This calculator relies on cookies when you want to “save” your results, and also makes use of them when you’re not logged in, in order to allow you to access your previous runs of the calculator without having to create an account.
Another of our clients, also in the financial space, produces documents containing financial info about funds, and marketing materials. These docs are subject to strict compliance rules determining what can be shown to users based on what “type” of investor is viewing the site, and where in the world they’re viewing from.
Anybody visiting the site self-identifies by manually selecting an investor “type” and a location. This info gets set into a cookie, and the site serves content based on the values in that cookie. If the site can’t identify the cookie or it has an invalid value, it’ll basically be unusable, in order to protect the company themselves.
Another example might be shopping carts or session storage. Anything that persists from page to page. Does the site have an option for dark mode display? Probably stored in a cookie. Option to change the display language? Yeah, also likely a cookie.
Yeah, 100%! And the languages one generally opens up to a third-party system like WeGlot, whether the cookie is first-party or not. It’s sort of amazing to me how collaborative the modern web is, but also just how insecure it can be.
It can be really locked down but I would say at least half of the wordpress sites online (and wordpress powers something like 20%+ of the whole open internet, iirc) pull in all sorts of third-party scripts and code that isn’t vetted by the people including them (including me! Only so many hours in a workday, after all).
Yes, you’re spot on; it’s mostly about elements and functionality not working. Just as a heads up, I work in the WordPress ecosystem so the following brief descriptions will be focused on PHP based sites. I’m sure there are ways round using cookies, such as using
localStoragein JavaScript etc. Anyway!The biggest thing you’ll run into is anything to do with login systems. Any website that offers a login/account typically makes use of cookies, in order to let the website “remember” that you’re logged in, between page navigation.
One of our clients offers a comparison calculator for investments. This calculator relies on cookies when you want to “save” your results, and also makes use of them when you’re not logged in, in order to allow you to access your previous runs of the calculator without having to create an account.
Another of our clients, also in the financial space, produces documents containing financial info about funds, and marketing materials. These docs are subject to strict compliance rules determining what can be shown to users based on what “type” of investor is viewing the site, and where in the world they’re viewing from.
Anybody visiting the site self-identifies by manually selecting an investor “type” and a location. This info gets set into a cookie, and the site serves content based on the values in that cookie. If the site can’t identify the cookie or it has an invalid value, it’ll basically be unusable, in order to protect the company themselves.
Another example might be shopping carts or session storage. Anything that persists from page to page. Does the site have an option for dark mode display? Probably stored in a cookie. Option to change the display language? Yeah, also likely a cookie.
Yeah, 100%! And the languages one generally opens up to a third-party system like WeGlot, whether the cookie is first-party or not. It’s sort of amazing to me how collaborative the modern web is, but also just how insecure it can be.
It can be really locked down but I would say at least half of the wordpress sites online (and wordpress powers something like 20%+ of the whole open internet, iirc) pull in all sorts of third-party scripts and code that isn’t vetted by the people including them (including me! Only so many hours in a workday, after all).