QOTD: Do You Delete Your Browser Cookies?
Spending any amount of time online requires that one practice some safe usage patterns. This means being weary of scam emails, scam websites, and just the general bad hook.
More often than not however, people are lured into tricks and masquerades. Consequently, sensitive personal data is revealed, and things are stolen. One of the most famous areas of this debate have been browser cookies. If you don't already know, cookies store custom information about you--that you've usually entered)--when visiting a website so that the next time you go back, the website can reload your information. Things like custom themes, or forum logins are stored in this manner.
Sometimes however, a cookie can contain a lot more. Those who are very sensitive about security swear that you should delete all cookies after every browsing session. Others could care less.
Our question of the day is: Do you delete your browser cookies? If so, why?
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I never delete my cookies. I feel no need to. The worst I've had is tracking cookies for online ad targeting, which doesn't bother me.
No i dont really worry about security and privacy to be honest. I just make it a point to change my passwords. And pay attention to what i do on the computer.
Usually every few days..it varies depending on the sites in question. I personally see a bigger threat from who's controlling the backbone of the internet, rather than a few cookies.
I regularly delete cookies and work from two broswers; IE and Firefox.
I use ccleaner to clear out the cookies and temp files and that is usually after a session of browsing assuming there is no page saved for viewing later.
This may seem like overkill but I would prefer that than the alternative if things went badly.
Cookies can only be read from the same domain as the website that set them unless there is an XSS vulnerability in the site (If so then cookies are the least of your problems). The advert tracking cookies can only be seen by the advert company and to be honest I don't care if they know that I (Just some random person to them) visited a website and clicked on one of their links. The only problem with cookies is that they could give someone an indication of what sites you have been visiting if they managed to get access to your computer. But cookies are used so much to give users a better experiance such as auto login, remembering settings or even just forwarding you to the UK version of a site without asking everytime that there really isn't much point in turning them off.
I never deleted my cookies.
Only when there is a virus on my pc.
ccleaner everyday.
Never delete cookies that way the anti virus software has something to find and makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
I tend to go on quite a few 'dodgy' sites, so I disallow third party cookies, disable Java (and for some sites Javascript), run Adblock Plus and have set Firefox to delete all cookies, history etc automatically when exiting. The only problem with this is, is that passwords etc. aren't automatically remembered - but I see this as a benefit.
It's very rare that I delete cookies, but then, I usually don't even bother with AV these days.
I have nothing worth stealing on most of my machines and nothing that I care about enough to stop me just formatting and trying a new distro/windows build.
Important sites (banking/access passwords to other peoples sites/machine) I don't save passwords for anyway.
"Others could care less"
Should be:
Others COULDN'T care less.
What is it with Americans and saying "could care less" ! It means the complete opposite to what you want to say.. doesn’t make any sense