• • • • This quick fix will show you how to clear out cookies and the cookie-like things that can be used to track you online. If you already know what cookies are all about then you can skip the next bit and go straight to the instructions. Pivot guns pack free. Why cookies are important Cookies are very small pieces of information given to your web browser by the sites you visit. Your browser will store the cookies until they expire and will include them in any messages it sends to the website they originally came from. Cookies are a normal and extremely important part of the way the web operates because they enable a sort of short-term memory. The HTTP protocol – the language used by web browsers to talk to websites – is stateless and no information is retained between any two HTTP events. Simplistically, a basic website will behave as if it’s the first time you’ve ever been there every single time you ask it for a web page. However, if the website gives you a unique cookie the first time you ask for a page, you’ll give it back every time you ask for another page. If all your page requests contain the same unique cookie the website can see that they’re all coming from the same source. Being able to link individual, stateless actions together like this is a fundamental building block of the web. Without this, short-term memory websites would just be brochures – there would be no Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, PayPal, WordPress, Gmail Of course, if anyone wants to track you, being able to identify two or more actions as coming from the same source is also the fundamental thing. Third party cookies A website can only read the cookies that it has created – it cannot read cookies created by other sites. In order to track an individual from one website to another, the different sites all have to share some code from a third party website. The code that creates and reads the tracking cookie is hosted by the third party and it can keep reading its own cookies as you hop from site to site. That’s how advertisers and tracking companies work, it’s how the same adverts can appear to follow you around the web and it’s how, for example,. ![]() ‘Super’ cookies Although cookies are the most well known way to track somebody, there are other technologies that can be used for the same ends. The most recent version of HTML,, has a feature variously called web storage, DOM storage or local storage that allows websites to create small but significant databases on users’ machines. Adobe’s Flash player has a similar feature that allows Flash content embedded in web pages to create and read locally shared objects (LSOs). LSOs are sometimes referred to as Flash cookies or super cookies. Because LSOs are stored by your Flash player and not your browser they can be used to track all the web activity originating from one computer, not just from one browser. ![]() ETags When a web server sends you a web page, an image or any other kind of file, it sometimes sends a text string called an entity tag (ETag) with it. The ETag is a short ID that uniquely identifies a specific version of a specific file. If your browser asks for the same file again it will send the ETag with the request. If you already have the latest version, the web server doesn’t need to send it to you all over again which saves bandwidth and speeds things up. Unfortunately, it didn’t escape the notice of tracking companies like KISSmetrics that ETags are something that websites give to users that they give back again in later requests. By embedding the same file, such as a transparent image, in every web page and ensuring each new visitor is given a different ETag they could be turned in to de facto cookies – or used as a sneaky way to. Fingerprinting Recent research suggests that many browsers have a profile so distinct that they.
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