According to a recent study published by NordVPN, a leading solution in the VPN market, the French continue to accept cookies to save time, knowing that they should be wary of it. Only 6% of French Internet users refuse all cookies.
Only 6% of French people refuse all cookies
It’s been nearly four years since the rules changed for website publishers. In 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced to protect the privacy of Internet users and ask for their consent. The CNIL keeps a close watch to ensure that all websites on French territory offer an option to refuse cookies. The rule is simple: refusal must be as easy to choose as acceptance. If a site has a button “accept everything”it must also have a button “deny everything”.
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Despite this new regulation whose objective was to give control to users so that they are able to refuse to be tracked by trackers, NordVPN’s study shows that this policy is a failure. Even if the French say they don’t want cookies, they still accept them. The study shows that only 6% of French people systematically refuse cookies from their web browsing and that 46% accept them in their entirety.
79% of Internet users are afraid of being watched
Yet 79% of respondents say they are afraid of being watched (51% by cybercriminals and 47% by social networks, including Facebook). That’s not all, 48% of French people also know that their data is analyzed by sites for their internal use, and 44% believe that it is used by cybercriminals for identity theft or fraud.
A paradoxical behavior, which questions. Researchers find that Internet users accept cookies by default, in order to save time, because the option to refuse all at once often requires several clicks. Few websites offer to refuse all cookies on the first click.
As Daniel Markuson, digital privacy expert at NordVPN explains, “Cookies can track users’ online activity and provide partial identification of their identity. Cookies are also a source of vulnerability: if they are incorrectly configured or if you visit a malicious website, they can create security holes..
In the published study, NordNVP advises users to take the time to properly set cookies. It is not a random choice. Private browsing can also be a solution to get rid of it.