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Stop Tracking Me!
May 8, 2011 6:26 AM   Subscribe

I have (up to date) Adblock Plus & Ghostery installed for Firefox 4 OSX 10.6.7. I have Firefox configured to delete all cookies on a restart. Why is it that after I restart Firefox all these cookies are still there?

Additionally, I have Ghostery & Adblock configured to block ALL of those cookies. Why do they keep reappearing? The cookies in the screenshot that I linked to are from one click on a website. I also have Abine installed. What am I doing wrong? What do I not understand?
posted by futz to computers & internet (8 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Do those include flash cookies?
posted by pharm at 6:53 AM on May 8, 2011


I believe flash cookies have been known to reinstall regular cookies. A clean wipe requires deletion of both regular and flash cookies.
posted by caddis at 7:00 AM on May 8, 2011


BetterPrivacy will remove flash cookies for you.

Also, do you have a homepage configured? They might be coming from that, but that's unlikely if you have them blocked.
posted by Solomon at 7:04 AM on May 8, 2011


yeah, using flash cookies to reinstall flash cookies is one of the evercookie techniques... if you're clearing out all your history every time you use the browser, you may as well just permanently use the Private Browsing mode, which should be harder for sites to workaround.
posted by russm at 7:07 AM on May 8, 2011


"reinstall http cookies", I mean
posted by russm at 7:09 AM on May 8, 2011


I think they are being set by Abine or one of your privacy applications as opt-out cookies to notify those ad networks not to track you. Check the contents of them (expand one of the sites, select a cookie and look at the bottom of the window), you should see something contents confirming that.
posted by Boobus Tuber at 7:16 AM on May 8, 2011


This isn't perfectly on topic, but I think you might want to look at https://panopticlick.eff.org/ , it measures how identifiable your browser is, and there are often some ways to make it less traceable.
posted by Canageek at 9:27 AM on May 8, 2011 [1 favorite]


Abine's FAQ entry on opt-out cookies (which I hadn't heard of before, thanks, Boobus Tuber)
posted by hattifattener at 11:07 AM on May 8, 2011 [1 favorite]


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