

Ask HN: (how often) do you clear your cookies? - Someone

In light of the discussion w.r.t. Google working around Safari's "do not accept third party cookies" setting, I wonder whether people clear their cookies (web and Flash) regularly, and if so, how often. Related to that, do you use private mode as a means to fight tracking?
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a_a_r_o_n
Almost never.

I used to clear history, cookies, everything on browser restart.

I've let the water wash over me, and now I like typing things in the address
bar and already being there, or being remembered like Norm when I visit a site
again.

Rarely a site will piss me off and I'll go in and delete _their_ cookies. I
know they can feel it when I do that.

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rplnt
Never manually. But I use multiple browsers (Opera, Chrome, sometimes Firefox)
simultaneously (well, in parallel) and I have separate work and personal
computers. Sometimes I even use private browsing; and not only for "buying
presents".

But I believe this doesn't prevent me from Google knowing all about it.
Whether I use one browser or other, private browsing or not. Some do-not-track
extension which would completely block downloading and executing of tracking
scripts might have help. But I'm not that paranoid. Yet.

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mike-cardwell
I use a Firefox addon named Cookie Monster. All cookies, not just third party
cookies are blocked by default. When you come across a site where you need
cookies, you select one of four options from the icon on the status bar:

    
    
      1.) Temporarily allow cookies from example.com
      2.) Accept cookies from example.com
      3.) Reject cookies from example.com
      4.) Accept session cookies from example.com
    

For news.ycombinator.com, I selected option 4 the first time I needed to log
in and it is persistent.

The only time you ever need to accept cookies from a site, is when you're
logging in to something, or buying something. And there's never any need to
accept anything other than session cookies. You don't _need_ cookies at all to
browse news sites or blogs etc.

This is an incredibly small amount of work. It is considerably less work than
NoScript or RequestPolicy for example. And it provides so many benefits. Most
days I don't even need to touch the Cookie Monster configuration. It's only
when I sign up for something new or buy something from a new site, and it's a
two second job, and I can usually recognise that I'm going to need to do it
before anything even breaks.

EDIT: Also, Firefox is set to completely clear my history on exit. Including
history, cache and offline website data. I've never felt that doing this made
my web browsing any more inconvenient.

~~~
pan69
Does any know if there is something similar to Cookie Monster for Chrome?

Since recently I only visit Facebook in an incognito window for the purpose of
cookies. I'd like to block all sites by default as well.

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garethsprice
Never, for regular browsing.

I use Firefox's Web Developer plugin to clear cookies for a specific domain if
I'm developing and need to test clearing cookies.

If I don't trust a site or don't want it leaving traces I'll use Chrome's
Incognito mode.

Never really got the fuss about cookies, some people seem really paranoid and
diligent about clearing them. I don't really care, and I'm usually very
mindful of privacy issues.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Here is one reason you might block/clear cookies, and be concerned about these
issues:

If you want to use a Google or Facebook account, but at the same time, you
don't want them to be able to link your general browsing history outside of
Google/Facebook with your account. ie, the sites you visit and when you visit
them.

I don't think it's fair to call people with that sort of concern, "paranoid".
I think "prudent", "informed" or "sensible" are more appropriate words.

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waitwhat
I set Firefox and Chrome to clear everything when they're closed. All my
logins are managed through KeePass, so logging back into a website is just one
keypress away.

~~~
kxs
Do you use an extension in Chrome to do this or surf permanently incognito? I
was under the impression that it's not (yet) possible to do so automatically
in Chrome (vanilla).

~~~
waitwhat
Wrench -> Options -> Under the Hood -> Privacy -> Content Settings... ->
Cookies -> "Clear cookies and other site data when I close my browser"

~~~
kxs
Thanks, my fault, I mixed it up with "Clear Browsing Data".

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dgallagher
I reset Safari on OSX frequently, and do the same with Chrome.

On iOS I run Safari in private browsing mode all the time. Not really to auto-
delete cookies (it does that), but because if you have a history of websites
and you start typing in the address bar, it attempts to auto-complete the
URIs, which freezes Safari for a second, and delays keyboard inputting. Apple
doesn't have a time-delay of 1-2 seconds after the previous keystroke, so its
auto-complete is really annoying and slows down/breaks the UI. Bookmarks have
to be empty too to work.

That said, private-mode iOS Safari crashes a whole lot more than non-private
mode. This usually happens on newspaper websites (UI hell) when all of the ad
network and javascript widget garbage attempt to load. If you hit Stop-Loading
after the article text is loaded, but before that other crap does, it fixes
the problem. Funny, but disabling Javascript seems to crash more than leaving
it on, but on different websites, likely for different reasons.

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icebraining
Until recently, never. Now I've started allowing them only for the session,
except for a few websites like HN. Of course, my session usually lasts for
days, even a week or more (I rarely shutdown the laptop, I just put it to
sleep).

I wonder if there's an addon for Firefox to clear them after a few hours.

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spindritf
I have Firefox configured to remove almost everything on exit, including
cookies and flash cookies, also do it manually when I'm switching proxies,
have disabled third party cookies which seems to be working in Firefox
(<http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/?hl=en> returns "Cookies are
disabled").

As preventive measures I have Ghostery, NoScript, and Adblock with EasyPrivacy
list <https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/> installed and only use Chromium in
private mode when the site is some cool demo from HN, as those tend not to
work with all the limitations. Next up: full blown paranoia and Qubes (I'm
only half joking).

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foreverbanned
Firefox : everytime I close it, and third party cookies not allowed.

Chrome : never

I use Chrome almost exclusively to check my gmail account and Firefox for
everything else.

I am aware that Chrome and Firefox share a flash cookie on the subdomain
mail.google.com, but apparently it does not contain tracking data. Moreover it
is not supposed to be sent when I use the main domain (if adobe follows the
RFC). Google.com could hide an iframe pointing to mail.google.com but they
wouln't dare, would they ?

So I think I am pretty safe from google tracking for now. Anyway, when I have
time I will search HN comments and the web for a list of hostnames to map to
127.0.0.1 in my hosts file.

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SquareWheel
Rarely, and usually unintentionally. I have tried tools to prevent tracking
such as Ghostery in the past, and my experience is that it breaks the web so
much it's not worth the trouble.

~~~
zalew
How does it break the web exactly? I use ghostery and don't experience it.

~~~
SquareWheel
I spent far too long finding web sites that failed to load or experienced
problems, and constantly tracked them back to Ghostery. It was actually
interfering with web development, and so I uninstalled it after 5 days or so.

I use adblock plus* and click-to-play flash embeds now. Occasionally a website
breaks because of it, but very rarely.

*I whitelist websites I want to support, but a lot of websites go too far. I've been the 1,000,000th site visitor too many times.

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Sander_Marechal
Never (well, once a year manually or so). But if there was a Firefox plugin
that let me clear my cookies on shutdown _except_ for cookies of sites I want
to keep, I'd use that!

~~~
hansen
Check "Accept cookies from from sites" and choose "Keep until I close FF".
Then add exceptions w/ status "Allow" for sites you want to store cookies.

~~~
ben0x539
This is what I do, too.

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paulsutter
I believe the most common cause of cookie deletion is hitting the browser
cookie limit, and old cookies rolling off. The sheer number of JavaScript tags
on websites (I've seen a list of over 600 third party trackers), multiplied by
the number of sites you visit for those trackers that create per domain
cookies (for example google analytics), then add in the multiple unintentional
cookies created by programming frameworks on each domain, and the limit gets
hit pretty fast.

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code_pockets
I run with the most strict settings that firefox has to offer. No cookies,
private browsing, no JS, etc.

On top of that, I use noscript, ghostery, the web dev toolbar, better privacy,
and adblock.

Only use cookies to log into HN to post (I browse without logging in), my
email, and other programming-related page (such as /r/programming).

I also use a proxy for those times that I must use Google (my search engine of
choice is Duck Duck Go (it works great)).

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dhruvasagar
I am a web developer, so I delete them quite often while working. Although
when I am not working, never.

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artellectual
I reset my cookies all the time, when doing development on my machine
sometimes, the browsers just need a good reset to behave normally again.

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jrubinovitz
I do it weekly, but mainly because I experiment a lot with my OS and will
generally have to re-install it once a week.

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railsmax
I can't remember when I do this. I use ubuntu - so I do not afraid of
malicious programs, and only I have got access to my computer.

~~~
chrisacky
You realise the ignorance and nativity in this statement? I use Ubuntu also,
but that doesn't absolve/protect me from all potential issues I may run in
when browsing/using the web.

Heck, the original poster may have actually been refering to clearing the
cookies to avoid tracking.

However, when things like <http://samy.pl/evercookie/> exist, it makes it even
more harder to avoid tracking cookies.

Andd moreover, "only I have got access to my computer". You are every non-
ecrypted hop you make from your system to the target network has access to
your requests, making you vulnerable to man in the middle attacks.

I think you were/are just a little misguided.

~~~
railsmax
What are you afraid of?? Did smth bad happened with you?

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vseorlov
Never, I dont need it.

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kenneth_reitz
Never.

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ranit8
I set Firefox to auto-remove cookies when closing it. I mostly navigate in
private mode. Whenever I find something slightly interesting I bookmark it.
Later I switch to normal mode, navigate all the new links to put them in
history, and remove them from bookmarks. So I can keep a tiny[1] searchable
history and not spam the bookmarks.

[1] it was tiny until I met HN, now it grows like a monster.

