Saturday, October 17, 2009

Cookies: The hidden ones, and how to remove them


This shows an add-on for your Firefox browser which will detect hidden and invisible 'supercookies' that get placed on your computer by Flash objects, and are there forever, unless you know how to detect them and remove them. This 'BetterPrivacy 1.29' does that. So if you use Firefox, and you probably should, then do yourself a favor and get this little extension for it. On its Options page, you can set it to automatically find and remove these otherwise unknown cookies. Why the big deal? Because these have a much larger capacity for storing information and sending it back home to 'Mission Control' where they came from than any ordinary cookies ever had before - and these can be programmed to do other things besides reporting back to headquarters. They can make changes to your setup, and you don't even know they are there, so you don't know why something has changed, or more importantly, where to look for whatever did it. So this program could save you a lot of headaches. Cleaning out that whole nest of hidden supercookies also results in reducing the demands on your RAM - mine dropped about 100 Mb after removing all those things.
So this is definitely a good thing, as Martha Stewart might say.  
 
Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. Monsieur Beep!October 18, 2009 at 2:09 PM

    I also have the impression that my machine is connected to some headquarter - who knows.

    It´s good when you know what´s going on in the background of your machine.

    Does your extinction programme also give the user a bit of champagne and satisfaction over his victory in the form of showing the accumulated files and cookies blowing up on the screen in a big fireball and a loud bang????

    ReplyDelete
  2. RayOctober 18, 2009 at 3:42 PM

    Sorry, no clouds of purple smoke and loud explosions, but after you set it to automatically remove each of those things it finds (and more are being planted each time you go on line) then whenever you close your browser, it will pop up a little window telling you that it is ready to remove (a number here) of them, and asking you if you want to save any of those, or remove them all.
    So you have choices. It asks, because some may be required to make certain 3rd-party programs function properly - although I haven't found any like that yet.
    I've been letting it dump them all.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)