-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:59:12 -0800 Richard C. Steffens wrote: > > An article in yesterday's USA Today (USA Yesterday?) described > tracking done by various web sites using cookies. It focused on > Facebook in particular and talked about the various ways Facebook > tracks visitors to a Facebook site. My understanding is that this > is only possible through the use of cookies -- at least for those > not logged in to Facebook. > > So, if I visited a Facebook page I'm supposed to have been given a > cookie that will in some way track my web travels. I think it's > something to do with whether or not the pages I visit have a > Facebook connection on them, but I don't really know those > details. > > What I'd like to know is how I can inspect individual cookies to > determine where they came from. It appears that I can "manage" my > Firefox cookies by clicking on Tools > Clear Recent History ... . I > have only a few options. I can choose the time frame to clear, and > I can choose the category of thing to clear, cookies being one of > the categories. > > I don't want to clear all the cookies. I want to look at the > collection, which now appears to be kept with sql-lite. > > Does anyone know of a tool that let's me inspect the cookie > collection and decide what to keep and what to get rid of?
If you prefer not to be tracked and have all your web browsing sliced, diced and analyzed to a fare-thee-freakin-well by every marketeer and gawd knows who else on the planet, the safest thing to do is allow as few cookies as possible, and even restrict many to be session cookies. You can do this in Firefox at Edit > Preferences > Privacy, simply by unchecking the box 'Accept cookies from sites' and setting up explicit permissions with the Exceptions button, which opens a list of cookies. Go through the list and delete all cookies for websites that you don't recognize as places such as forums where you've registered an account. Those websites for which you want to keep your userids between visits, you should Allow, and other websites that you want to access that need you to allow cookies will usually be satisfied by 'Allow for Session'. You should also click the checkbox 'Tell websites I do not want to be tracked', plus 'Clear history when Firefox closes', to foil Facecrack. You might be surprised at how few cookies you actually need to permit. Regards, Robert -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk7FV90ACgkQ+qYMIUkNJCzMHgCeLXhq8+a5qtQc8R3ruM0QZ1WC X1EAoMq9S58QJeYMJPux8s/SaQZdQS99 =lFz9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
