The archive search isn’t working, so I don’t know if this’s been covered before, but it’s a simple question.
I don’t enable my cookies unless a web site demands it. Am I a putz?
I’m not some conspiracy theorist. I don’t normally think anybody’s out to get me or my personal information. I turned my census form in promptly. But for some reason, I’ve always been suspicious of cookies. Am I just plain ill informed? Since I really don’t know much about how they work, I’d like to be enlightened.
The thought of ad agencies knowing where I prowl online just gives me the willies. Especially 'cause they’d see how much time I waste here :o
I enable cookies, but regularly delete all but a select few. They’re mostly harmless, but my feeling is that it’s none of their damn business where I’ve been.
The last time I deleted some cookies, my cookie file got messed up, and I haven’t tried it since. Is it just a regular text file? Any trick i have to know?
I went for a short while with cookies turned off, but found it wasn’t worth the trouble. All the sites wanting to set cookies were just remembering my preferences from one session to the next. This is a convenience for me.
I suppose you already know that a cookie can be stored on your computer by a web site, so that the information will be available to that web site when you ask for another web page. The good news is that a cookie set by one site cannot be read by another*. So basically cookies allow a site to remember what you’ve done there before.
There is a bug with Netscape and Internet Explorer (but not Opera) that a cookie can be set in such a way as to be universally available, but AFAIK no web sites exploit it.
The problem recently has been with services such as double-click.com, where a web page from one site can contain a reference to cause your browser to contact double-click, who reads the double-click cookie, and then double-click gives the third-party site information it has compiled on you. This means that one store could know what products you’ve bought from another store. Pretty sneaky, but they’re basically trying to present targeted web pages to you.
That’s the same thing that stores are allowed to do already with more old-fashioned technologies such as mail order, so that if I buy fishing products from one store, a boat supplies store can buy the customer list and send me their catalog. But now it’s automated to a new level.
Also, the ad agencies won’t know the sites you’ve been browsing unless those sites use a service such as double-click.
I have heard that the latest version of netscape (which just came out a week or two ago) lets you selectively enable/disable cookies, depending on who they’re from. I can’t believe it’s taken this long to add this feature! I use Cookie Pal, which lets me only accept cookies from places where it helps me (the straight dope board, amazon.com, etc.). I have filters for most of the ad sites, such as doubleclick.
I have a program called Window Washer, which is available at www.anonymizer.com, that can selectively delete cookies as well as document history streams and other local files, which is helpful for shared computers. These things can be done individually, but this program is nice because it automates the task. There are other programs that just take care of cookies; look around on the web.
Like Geobabe, I also use WindowWasher because it does some other really things like delete all the crap Windows insists on hiding away in the cache folders as well as some other less visible places.
I also use CookiePal to help filter the cookies I allow to be sent. It’s available at: www.kburra.com.
Used together the programs do a great job of managing cookies and deleting unwanted stuff.