For years now, the cookie banner has been the universal symbol of online surveillance. It’s a pop-up most of us dismiss without reading, but it’s a silent acknowledgment that someone, somewhere, is watching. The privacy-conscious among you may even have started to control what cookies a site saves on your system, but trackers have now evolved beyond that. While you’ve been rejecting all cookies with righteous satisfaction, clearing cookies is useless, and the actual tracking infrastructure has moved on, making cookies increasingly irrelevant. The industry has built something far more persistent, far more invisible, and far harder to fight back against. Related I stopped using “Incognito Mode” for privacy after learning about fingerprinting It’s just not doing what you think it is. Cookies are no longer the main privacy problem Websites are moving beyond traditional tracking methods Credit: Gavin Phillips / MakeUseOf Third-party cookies, the kind that let an ad network follow you from a shoe store to a news site, are being phased out across major browsers. Safari and Firefox have blocked them for years, …