The Cookie Jar
Fall 2021
I participated in Forbes Hacks 2021, an annual Shark Tank-style competition held by the Swanson School of Engineering for first-year engineering students. We were given two hours to design a solution to unethical data acquisition. My team's winning design was affectionately named "The Cookie Jar." Continue scrolling to see our full solution.
The Website
For the purpose of our presentation, my team created a full-fledged website with all of the tabs and information that would be on our website once we got our service up and running. The four tabs are as follows: Home (shown to the right), Extension, Information, and Cookie Crusher. All of these work together to construct our full product, targeted at making people more informed about the cookies that they agree to.
The Extension
The primary feature of our product is our browser extension, available on all of the most popular internet browsers. The way that it would work is whenever you open a new webpage and it asks you to accept all of their cookies, this menu will drop down from the corner. It will list out all of the cookies that you are agreeing to, list them based on risk (red for bad, green for good, yellow for somewhere in between), and allow you to select which ones you want to allow. There will also be an about button, which links to our information page shown below.
Information Page
The information page on our website will include more detailed descriptions of different types of cookies, as well as the positives and drawbacks for each. This will help people make the most informed decisions regarding their cookies that they can.
Cookie Crusher
The last page on our website is an educational game for children to help increase their digital literacy. The way that it will work is that cookies will appear on the page and their appearance will inform what type of cookie they are. The instructions will tell them what type of cookies each one represents, as well as why they are bad or good. The goal is to crush all of the bad cookies, but leave the good ones intact. We felt that a game would be the best way to help youth learn about cookies because this information could otherwise appear very boring.