Those annoying website pop-ups about cookies – what should you do about them?

Some websites give users lots of options about managing cookies. Other websites are less clear. — Dreamstime/TNS

If you’re using the Internet, you’re bound to run into pop-up messages from websites asking you how you feel about cookies. Not the edible kind that everyone likes, but the software kind that websites have been planting on your computer for years without your knowledge or consent.

Those messages were prompted in part by Europe’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which requires sites to notify you what personal information they’re collecting about you and what they might do with it. Since the laws went into effect, an increasing number of sites have been using the pop-ups to let people know that they use cookies and offering them a chance to stop the sale of their personal information.