Cookies were popular in confectionary industry. They travelled from Persia to Europe. Later in the 19th century, they appeared in California at the instance of the Chinese and Japanese immigrants there. It is a sweet and tempting snack.

Cookies then made a jump from cuisine to complicated computer science world. It happened because of the work of Lou Montulli, an American computer programmer who was busy creating the first web browser in 1992. Those days he worked for University of Kansas and later for Netscape. He concluded that keeping user data in his web browser was preferable to storing it. It pertained to e-commerce site selling things to a user. He names it a Magic Cookie.

The innocent web cookie later became the bone of contention when privacy issues were raised. It was realised that a cookie with a little piece of text on the web browser revealed your surfing habits and at times even the credit card payment details at the website. Europe took this seriously, and equated it with Jewish detection of the Nazis in 1930s through a census. They enacted a new law, The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which was enforced in 2018. It requires a web user’s express permission to use a web cookie. There are fines if you violate the GDPR.

The US too is thinking on the lines of Europe to enforce the data privacy.

What was once a childhood pleasure, a cookie, has come to acquire a thing to be feared reputation.