Question about twitter cookie

I use the Cookie Monster add-on in Firefox, and scan daily for unwanted cookies.

One that keeps showing up is “twitter.com” which is odd, as I never, ever go to nor use twitter (and I never will:D).

Any idea why this shows up every time I use Firefox to browse other websites?

Many websites have sidebar widgets that show the latest tweets about some topic. Those cause your browser to make requests to twitter.com, which sets the cookie. If you don’t want them, get something like AdBlock and add *.twitter.com to the filters.

A site that has a “share with Twitter” icon on it somewhere will write a cookie like this to your browser.

It’s used for Twitter’s OAuth authentication system, I believe, so that it knows whether to ask you to log in to Twitter or not should you click the share button.

Harmless to remove or block. Might be inconvenient if you actually used those buttons, though. (You’d have to log in every single time.)

Thanks, guys. Not a big problem to removed it every time I check cookies, just wondered why it showed up, and now I know.