As explained in the post, keeping cookies indefinitely in your browser has some privacy concerns. All browsers have cookie management functions. You can easily delete all cookies or specific cookies. You can even configure certain cookies to be blocked while allowing others. But sometimes I like to retain a few cookies – for e.g. those from social forums, banking site, extension preferences – while deleting the rest across browsing sessions.

Firefox lets me create a whitelist and save cookie information. Chrome still does not give you that fine-tuned control. So, let’s look at a quick way to create a whitelist to save specific cookies in Chrome and a more global solution using a great freeware.

Vanilla for Google Chrome

Vanilla for Google Chrome is a very useful and a simple to use cookie management extension. Vanilla for Google Chrome allows you to add domain names to your whitelist. You can add top-level domain names (like www.google.com) or use wildcards (*.google.com) to bring all sub-domains (like docs.google.com, mail.google.com) within the scope of the whitelist. You can add domains to the whitelist manually from the whitelist manager that’s available under the extension’s options.

Please note that the extension mentions – The site that stores your login might be different from the site you are using. E.g. if you log on to youtube.com with your Google ID you have to add both. Also, you have to make sure that Clear cookies and other site data when the browser is closed is disabled in Chrome, otherwise all your cookies will be deleted. The protection of the whitelist when this is not done is still a beta feature.

But adding domain names to the whitelist is easiest from the extension’s icon on the omnibar. The omnibar will display the icon for every website that sends forth a first-party cookie.

The remaining configuration can be done from the Options page of the extension. As in the screenshot, you can set the extension to delete all cookies on startup except the ones on the whitelist and/or set it to auto-delete all cookies after 30 minutes.

The diagnostic tools enable you to view the cookies in your browser. A log lists all cookies with timestamps.

CCleaner

We have talked a lot about CCleaner. It has often been cited as one of the must-install PC maintenance tools. A lot of don’t use the browser’s inbuilt cleaning tools to wipe out temporary data but rely cleaning tools like CCleaner to optimize all corners of our system in one go. CCleaner cleans all traces of our browsing but it also gives us a way to create a whitelist and retain the use of specific cookies. Creating a whitelist with cookies of our most used sites is a dead easy process in CCleaner. After a normal browsing session, open up CCleaner and go to Options.

CCleaner captures all cookies that are in the browser(s) temporary cache and lists them. All you have to do select them from the list and move them to the protected list (Cookies to keep) using the arrow. As mentioned, this list includes all cookies from all internet browsers and Flash plugins.

Do you consciously manage your cookies with a whitelist that helps you keep certain cookies across your browsing sessions? Do you prefer Firefox or Chrome when it comes to ‘cookie management’?

Image Credit: Shutterstock

According to writer and hacker, Nik Cubrilovic, Facebook’s tracking cookies are not deleted when you log out of Facebook, but instead are simply altered. These cookies can then be used to track your online presence wherever you go via social plugins, to sell your information to third parties and for ad targeting.

Facebook has recently responded to these allegations via a comment on ZDNet. A Facebook engineer denied that Facebook is using these altered cookies as a source of information, but says they are instead used to protect users against hackers, prevent underage users from trying to re-register and to identify shared computers (again, to protect users who choose the “keep me logged in” option).

Even if this is true, we should all keep in mind that cookies can definitely be used for tracking. For example, if you log on to Facebook from a public computer, your account information stays on that computer even after you log out. What this information is used for by Facebook is one thing, but your tracks are not covered.

Also keep in mind that one of Facebook’s new features, frictionless sharing, will automatically share in your newsfeed any article you read which has the Facebook plugin. No active clicking involved  – it will just happen. Another good reason to stay logged out of your account while you’re surfing.

Sources: ZDNet, ReadWriteWeb

You browse the internet, you open and close websites, and you do not enter personal information, at least not often. While you do that, each and every page you visit leaves a little trace behind. If this information is not deleted, it can be used not only to track your browsing habits, but also to find out who you are.

Are you curious to find out What The Internet Knows About You? Then visit that link and see whether the information displayed is vaguely familiar. My result revealed that I had visited 65 of the 5,000 most popular internet websites.

And there is more. Did You Watch Porn? If your significant other checks your browser(s), he’d better find this:

Not shocked, yet? Maybe you are using XING. If you are, you will be interested in This Experiment.

It demonstrates how your anonymity can be lifted based on the social network groups you belong to. And this doesn’t work for just XING! If you are an active user of any social network, you likely belong to different groups within the network. Your group profile is almost like a fingerprint. The more groups you belong to, the less likely there will be someone else who is assigned to exactly the same groups and no others. The group traces left in your browser can lead back to who you are – your profile and eventually your real name.

So how can any website out there get access to this type of information?

History

Your browser stores a history of websites you have visited. Firefox typically records the past 7 days of browsing, downloads, as well as search and form history. Anyone who can open your browser has access to this information. Moreover, any website you open can look into your browser history and see which other websites you have been visiting. This information is being used to display custom information to you.

If you are uncomfortable with this type of information being available, you can customize your browser settings and disable history. In Firefox, go to > Tools > Options and navigate to the > Privacy tab.

Here you can choose the settings you’re comfortable with, for example > Clear history when Firefox closes or use the private browsing session.

Cookies

The screenshot above also shows what other traces websites leave on your computer: cookies.

Cookies are used to store user preferences, for example options, the contents of your shopping cart, or even usernames and passwords. Cookies are only text files, which can easily be viewed and will reveal which sites they originate from. So they are yet another threat to your privacy.

In Firefox, you can disable or remove cookies through the > Tools > Options > Privacy tab. Make your selection which types of cookies you would like to accept. To view or remove existing cookies, click on > Show Cookies and the menu shown in the screenshot below will open. You can remove individual cookies or all cookies at once.

CSS Styling Information: Visited Links

This is probably the least known “open door” to your privacy. All browsers can mark links to websites you have previously visited in a different color. For example, when you search Google, you immediately recognize which website you have already visited based on the link color.

While disabling browser history can be quite uncomfortable, disabling CSS styling information comes at a lower cost, but is just as effective. How it works is that your browser will not return information to a website, revealing whether or not you have already visited that or other websites. Hence, that website won’t be able to color code visited links or sniff out information about you.

In Firefox 3.5 you can easily disable visited links. Type > about:config in the address bard of your browser, filter for > layout.css.visited_links_enabled and double click the item to set its value to > false.

For Firefox, there are also several extensions and options that will protect your privacy. Here are a few articles you may want to review:

Guy showed you how to Really Delete Your Browsing History.
Karl wrote about a handy extension: Close N’ Forget Covers Your Firefox Browsing Tracks.
Varun compiled the 10+ Best Firefox Security and Privacy Addons.

Whether you disabled and cleared your browser history or disabled CSS visited link styling information, the result of What The Internet Knows About You should now be negative, the XING experiment should not reveal your name, and your significant other will never find out whether or not you did watch porn. Hooray for privacy!

Did the internet know anything about you that got you worried?

Image credits: mzacha

While they aren’t the chocolate kind you eat, cookies did cause a quite a security commotion a few years ago and it’s surely worth knowing how they work and what they do on your computer. Cookies are small bits of text data stored in your computer by websites you visit and are organized in a name:value pair along with a separate domain and expiration value. Cookie data is also sent back and forth between certain sites you visit whenever you travel to that site.

Google Search might place a cookie on your computer if you adjust your search preferences with the site for example. If you set your default Google display language to “Ewmew Fudd”, than Google will place a cookie on your computer with the following text:

“ID=87d29aeaeaf65698:U=4906f9bfc2fcadbb:LD=xx-elmer:NR=10:TM=1259122802:LM=1259165259:GM=1:S=tUvbIFprv_XP1fQP”.

You can see the word “elmer” and an ID in there, but the rest is not human readable- only data Google uses to store the rest of my search settings and language preferences. Many sites though simply store an ID for your specific computer to keep settings for you when you visit next. But, every time you visit Google again, their site will read this cookie and show you your results in “Ewmew Fudd” language.

Other popular examples where sites store cookies on your computer can be seen in shopping carts, and any site that requires a login or remembers you uniquely somehow during a “session” with that site. Analytics and visitor tracking to monitor how many times you return to a specific site are also another large source of cookies. Also, online ad services such as Google Adsense also store cookies on your computer to display and remember what kind of ads it thinks you might like.

The danger of cookies to some is that they can be used for targeted advertising online, and as I mentioned earlier, sites that use Google Adsense or Doubleclick can keep track of your preferences and ad likings and then target certain types of ads that you specifically like at you as you browse the web (but only on the sites that also use the same ad networks). Different organizations though have different privacy policies, and it is key to understand that targeting is not a threat or danger to your computer; it just makes some people uneasy if they are aware they are being targeted with certain ads.

The Network Advertising Initiative offer a simple page that you can visit here for example that allows you to opt out of some types of targeted advertising from many major ad networks, all on one page.

Most current browsers have an easy-to-use utility to view and remove cookies that sites have stored on your computer. Firefox for example allows you to right-click on a page you are viewing, click on “View Page Info” and then on the “Security” tab. From there in the “Privacy & History” tab, you can click on “View Cookies” to see any cookies that that site has stored on your computer. Chrome also allows you to . While disabling cookies might impair your browsing on many sites, if you’re worried about your cookie security, you can also simply clear out all of your cookies from within your browser’s “Clear Private Data” (Firefox) or “Clear Browsing Data” (Chrome) option. Internet Explorer also allows you to delete your browsing and cookie data every time you exit the browser from Tools > Internet Options.

Do you often clear out your browser history to get rid of cookies or do they sit for months in your computer? Got any additional comment on how websites may use cookies? Share your thoughts below in the comments.

Image Credit : scubadive67

Right about now, you may be thinking you don’t like that idea. Me neither. Yet, even worse are those cookies that track your activities, gather information and report it back to a website that you’ve never visited – a third-party website. The 2o7 cookie is one such cookie. What is this 2o7 cookie? Let’s take a look at it.

What is This 2o7 Cookie?

The 207 cookie is intended to track web usage and other information. The exact information that the 207.net cookie will track varies from user to user. The information is gathered and reported back to 207.net allegedly anonymously. Meaning, that it contains no information that can be used to identify that the information came from you.

This is hard to verify as there are many, many versions of the 207.net cookie. I’ll get into that in a second.

Who Made 2o7 Tracking CookieIt?

A marketing firm called Omniture creates the cookies that report back to 2o7.net. They do this on behalf of their customers, which include such heavy-hitters as eBay, Wal-Mart, Expedia and Ameritrade.  That’s why it’s hard to tell exactly what the cookie you have may be tracking. eBay will want different information than Ameritrade. One may be tracking the effectiveness of an e-mail campaign, while the other may be tracking their banner ad campaign.

Omniture set up the 207.net domain name as a way to maintain a degree of anonymity and to put the load of all these cookies onto a server that is used for nothing else. From a technology point of view, this is a good practice. From a public relations point of view, it’s a flipping disaster!

How Does this 2o7 Cookie System Work?

When you visit a site that is a client of Omniture, the site drops the cookie onto your computer. The cookie tracks the information it’s designed to track and sends it to the 2o7.net site. Now, Omnitrade does operate other domains that their cookies report to as well, but 207.net seems to be the most popular.

Omnitrade compiles the data into something meaningful and sends that information to their client. If that’s the case, then these cookies are relatively innocuous. However, some clients may also request to have that information sent to someone else as well. That’s where things get a bit colluded. Who are they sending it to? For what reason? Is it really anonymous?

Is the 2o7 Cookie Bad?

People that look at the cookies and see the 207.net part and then visit the 207.net domain would see nothing – a blank page. Then they would do a whois on the domain name and find that it is owned by Omniture. Not knowing who in hades Omniture was, things seemed, dare I say it, ominous? (Omniture does now have a page there that explains the generalities of the cookies.)

The other aspect to these cookies is they do take up resources. They do affect your Internet speeds and your computer speed. It may be an insignificant amount or it may bring you to a near-standstill.

Yet overall, cookies aren’t that bad. There are bad ones, but for the most part they are very helpful. They store information such as website preferences, login information and such, that make it easier to use many websites.

How Do I Stop the 2o7.net Cookie?

If you are still unsure about the 207 cookie, you can delete it and block 3rd party cookies from being set again. You do NOT need special software for this. Omniture does have a page that can help you with this, but guess what? Yep, it sets another cookie. The opt-out cookie only works for the browser and computer that you set it on. So if you use Firefox on your home computer, that’s the only one the opt-out cookie will block from 2o7.net.

Here’s a small tutorial on how to block 3rd party cookies in Firefox, then in Internet Explorer.

How to Block 3rd Party Cookies Like 2o7 in Firefox

It’s pretty easy, yeah. Click on Tools in the top toolbar. Then click on Options. Just like below.

When the Options window opens, click on the cute mask for Privacy, then uncheck the accept third-party cookies checkbox. Now, you will receive only cookies that report back to their originating site. Easy peasy!

Block Third-Party Cookies Like 2o7 in Internet Explorer

Pretty much the same as Firefox, really. Click on Tools in the menu bar, then click on Internet Options.

When the Internet Options window opens, click on the Privacy tab. Now you’ll see the slider. To block only 3rd party cookies, slide the slider to Low. Realistically, having it on Medium at the least is probably safer.

Now with all that done, you have no worries about the 207.net cookie. Sound good?

If this article helped you, I’d be glad to hear about it. If you know something more about 207.net cookie being more dangerous than I’ve described, let us and our readers know in the comments.

Yes that is why you learned about your Web History and cookies. You even know how to delete them when you are done with your porn your research. But what happens if you forget? Will you be fired, divorced or worse?

If this has you worried then Close N’ Forget is the plug-in for you!

Simply browse on over to their plug-in page here (in French) and you can do your due diligence and read up on it here in English.

After running through the plug-in installation you will have a right click option that looks like this:

The red X followed by “Close and erase cookies for the current site” is Close N’ Forget’s icon. Now for easier use we will add it to our FireFox’s favorite quick links by following these steps:

• Right Click on your tool bar at the top of your browser. And choose Customize.

• Select the Close and forget button, you might have to scroll down. It will look like this:

• Simply drag and drop the icon to your favorites bar and you will see it as the red x icon like this:

Now that we have the icon readily available to us let’s look at the options. This is what will happen when you hit that magic red x. We can see and configure the settings by going to our add-on manager within Firefox. You go to Tools ““> Add-ons.

Select Close N’ Forget and then hit options. You can tweak exactly what it will junk with the options above.

The Author says:

Thanks to a few simple options, you can control how your privacy is protected when you close a tab with Close’n Forget. To do that, simply go to the extension manager and open the Close’n Forget options dialog.

You can then activate or not the cookie removal, and you can extend it to all subdomains of the current page’s domain. For example, if the page currently loaded in the tab is http://www.foo.com/bar.html, you can remove cookies for www.foo.com and for .foo.com, but also for media.foo.com, ad.foo.com, tracker.foo.com and so on !

You can also remove the visited site from the browser’s history.

Now let’s put it to work!

You do some super secret browsing and then you go and hit that red X on your toolbar. The button glows an eerie redish brown when you hover over it to help you distinguish it from other  buttons. Hit the button and it closes the active tab and displays a message at the bottom of your browser like so telling you what it did. If nothing appears nothing was removed:

So with the right options selected (all of them!) you can safely and securely remove whatever site you want from your browsing history. But remember if someone is watching you with monitoring software this will not help!

How do you protect your browsing history and how do you get rid of nasty entries from your history? Do you automate it or do you do it manually? Share your methods with us in the comments.

Today, there are ways to help protect your information from being seen and used without your consent. These “opt-out” lists and “do not call” registries are free to use and in most cases they can be completed online.

OptOutPrescreen

OptOutPrescreen gives you the option to opt-out of credit card offers from Equifax, Experian, Innovis and TransUnion.

Catalog Choice

Choose from a list of merchants that offer an opt-out for catalogs you no longer wish to receive. To read more on how CatalogChoice can help you decrease the amount of junk mail, read more here – catalog choice features

Do Not Call

To opt-out from telemarketing phone calls sign up for the National Do Not Call Registry by visiting DoNotCall

Leave My Child Alone

A variety of resources for parents and information for opting out of OPTIONAL high school data bases that turn over private information on students to military recruiters. Visit LeaveMyChildAlone

Network Advertising Initiative

Online, many advertisers put cookies on your computer so they can gather information used for online advertising. Network Advertising Initiative is a website that offers a way to block the cookies from participating members of their advertising network. To opt-out, visit Network Advantage Initiative.

Network Advantage Initiative also offers tutorials on how to block cookies if you use Explorer, Firefox and Safari:

• Internet Explorer 7.x and Internet Explorer 6.x -Block Cookies Tutorial
• Firefox -Block Cookies Tutorial
• Safari -Block Cookies Tutorial

If you feel you’re being harassed by marketers, try using these sites to opt out.   Do you know of any other sites?  If so, let us know in the comments.

You may have used some sort of software to “erase your tracks” after doing some web surfing, but the traces are always there. As my wife is fond of saying, “no matter where you go, you leave a footprint.” She’s a Zen master or something.

So where do the tracks get left? Cookies and temp files are obvious and you can take care of them with software like CCleaner. You may also want to use secure file deletion programs to completely remove deleted files from your hard drive such as Eraser.

But what about the stuff you might not know about yet? Here’s a couple of areas that may retain information you don’t want others to see, and freeware to help you deal with them.

Delete Index.dat files

This works like a database. It’s not easily read by the human eye but contains the tracks of what programs you used, sites you visited, and even occasionally passwords. It resides in various places on your Windows computer, and stores information such as your computer usage history, cookies, and browser cache. You can check and delete index.dat file contets with Index.dat Suite.

With the Index.dat Suite you can:

• Use it as an index.dat viewer: Make any index.dat file readable, right from within the Index.dat Suite program. Here’s a screenshot of what the Cache Index.dat file says about my recent visit to Microsoft. I can tell you that in an investigation into a user’s inappropriate use of a business computer, I came across a cookie that had the username and password to a major adult dating site in plain English, using Index.dat Suite. Good thing I’m an ethical administrator.



• Look through the Cookies and History index.dat files to see what sites were visited and when.
• Search for index.dat files anywhere on your computer, open them, and read them.
• Filter the type of files shown from the index.dat file.
• elect records and delete them, which is probably the most important part of this software that this article relates to.

You may be asking now, “Guy, why don’t I just open up the index.dat file, delete everything and then save the file again?”

I would answer that you could do that, but if you are truly a tin-hatter, you would know that a completely blank index.dat file is VERY suspicious to the black-ops type searching your computer. Or your administrator. Same difference.

Delete MRU Keys from Windows Registry

In the Windows Registry (a scary place to be) there are many MRU keys. MRU stands for “Most Recently Used”. Take a look at the screen shot below and you can tell exactly when, and what image I worked on in Photoshop. There can be literally thousands of records like these in your registry. So you can do a lot more with this tool than deleting your browsing history.

MRU Blaster can help you find these records and remove them. (Always back up your registry before altering it ““ if you don’t know how to do that, don’t mess with the registry.)

MRU Blaster can be set up to automatically clean out MRU registry keys every time you log off or on, or you can run it manually. I prefer to use it manually, because the MRU keys provide the information for the auto-complete feature in a lot of programs. MRU Blaster’s settings window allows you to choose which common MRU keys to check or ignore. This will help you preserve a lot the auto-complete information you may like to keep.

Here’s what a typical scan shows on my computer ““ 100 MRU lists with 1041 MRU Items. That’s a lot of information about my computer using habits.

The detailed results don’t tell me a lot about what the MRU keys contain. However, just knowing that there are 1141 footprints on my computer tells me it needs to be cleaned. You can select individual keys to clean or leave them all checked for a thorough cleaning.

Now you are like a ninja dancing on rice paper. No footprints!!  Well, at least none that a non-ninja could find.

If you know of any other good track covering tips, let us know in the comments.