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Comment by Lornedon | Hacker News Reader

> We’re using “cookies” as a shorthand for any technologies that can access or store information on a person’s device. This can also include beacons, pixels, scripts, and other technologies.

That is a weird use of the word "cookie". In normal usage, it doesn't mean a technology that accesses or stores the information, it is that information itself.

"Pixels" is also weird. I think that they mean tracking pixels, which are one-pixel images that are just there so that the browser has to request them from the server and the server can notice that request. They are a subclass of "Beacons". Calling them a "technology that can access or store information on a person's device" seems misleading. Also, reCaptcha wouldn't need them. They already have Javascript running on my PC, they don't need a tracking pixel to contact the server.

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I actually thought it was a pretty decent caveat when writing for a non-technical audience. They're listing a bunch of different technologies that are (almost all the time) legally equivalent to cookies in the EU. And in EU privacy writing it's already common to use "cookies" to describe this whole area.

(The main exception to their list is scripts, which are only cookie-like to the extent that they use cookies or other client side storage)

While "pixel" was originally the 1x1 way back in the day, it's a generic term now used by industry to refer to analytics, often in tracking of user behavior and conversion events.

Cookies mean exactly that. You are just being overly pedantic.

And yes, running JS in a users browser to store or access information is exactly the same. Taking a browser fingerprint and storing it server side is also the same, just harder to get caught doing. This whole trying to maliciously take these laws literally need to stop.

Yes, I may be overly pendantic. This part just made me suspect that the author didn't have a technological background. That isn't bad per se, as this is mostly a legal topic.

Also, I'm not trying to "maliciously take these laws literally". The law isn't limited to cookies, so you can't get around it by using a narrow definition of the word "cookie".

Nothing in the text makes me think the authors do or do not have a technical background. Everything sounds correct both technically and legally to me (me being a technical person and not a lawyer).

> This part just made me suspect that the author didn't have a technological background.

Or perhaps the author does have a technical background, which is why they attempted to give a clear yet simple explanation for the non-technical?

People hear cookies are bad, they get pestered by cookie banners, so it makes sense to use cookie as an umbrella term. Their definition of tracking matches the law which is the important part.

I've heard "pixels" used generically to refer to the bundle of tracking code from a particular vendor in the marketing department at work. e.g. "Have you enabled the Facebook pixel?" means have you embedded the JavaScript snippet (usually with a fallback 1x1 pixel) that Facebook provides for tracking.

Pixels likely refers to 1x1 tracking images (image fetched from a server, and through that, they can get some data from you, like IP address or visited before)

Sorry, I sent my comment before it was done. It's edited now.

Yeah, I see your edit. With JS you can also detect whether it was fetched before, so that is a way of storing information about whether you have visited something before. Which can then be sent to the server. So, it kinda is storing data, kinda not.

> "Pixels" is also weird.

Could be a unique pixel that does or does not exist in the browser cache (is or isn't fetched (fought?)).

A pixel can store information as long as the cache works as expected.

In the end, you just use the cookie to store a unique id, and store everything on the server.

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