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"I accept": two words clicked thirty times a day, never read.
A cookie is a small file a site stores in your browser to recognise you. Some are essential (staying signed in, keeping a basket); others, third-party cookies, set by ad networks present on thousands of sites, exist to follow you from page to page and build your profile: interests, habits, presumed financial or family situation. That profile is then auctioned in real time on every page you load: that's how the ad "following you" finds you everywhere.
The problem isn't advertising itself: it's what targeting commits you to. A profile cataloguing your vulnerabilities attracts the least scrupulous advertisers, fake shops, fake "celebrity-endorsed" investments, toxic credit, served precisely to the people most likely to believe them. The good news: a few one-time settings (block third-party cookies, switch off personalisation, auto-refuse banners) cut most tracking. This theme teaches you the mechanics, the traps and the settings.
Learn to separate what a cookie actually does from the myths around it.
A cookie = a file that lets a site recognise you. The question isn't "cookie or not", but "who recognises me, and what for".
10 exercises per level, mixing decision, spotting and quiz. The first 2 levels are free; the next ones open with any subscription.
Each level ends with a mission: what remains to be done once the lesson is understood. Some rely on your report, others on a setting we cannot see: it says so each time.
A session cookie is what lets a site recognise you without a password. Stolen, it gets someone else recognised as you. Check whether your scan finds one: if it does, sign out of every session on that service.
In your email settings, find the option that loads images in messages automatically and turn it off. Marketing emails will no longer know when you open them, and you can still show the images with one click.
On the platform you use most, open the page that lists the interests it assigns you for advertising. Delete the ones about your health or your finances, then turn off personalisation if it lets you.
Open your browser's privacy settings. Block third-party cookies and choose the highest level of tracking protection it offers. If a site you need stops working, you make an exception for that site, not the other way round.
Open the account you use to sign in elsewhere with one click, often your email account or a social network. In its list of connected sites and apps, remove the ones you no longer use: each one keeps access to your profile.