The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Controlling Those Cookies Gordon Woolf

Cookie Monster is one of my favourite characters, and a favourite free utility as well. Cookies are those tiny text files that track where you are on the Internet. In their most innocuous form, a Web site with many pages will write one to your computer so that when you move from one page to another, they can easily track your movements.

Typically, cookies are used on e-commerce sites to record the fact than when you order something on one page, you are the same person who ordered something else on another page. Such cookies will usually have a time limit but that means should you leave the site or the power goes off, when you reconnect an hour or so
later, the site still knows who you are, but a day or two later your computer will have checked the time-to-delete setting of the file, and will have deleted it, so you start over.

Some stay alive longer, so, for example, when I go to the Amazon site, it knows I'm Gordon Woolf and includes links to pages aimed specifically at me based on my previous visits and information I have given them voluntarily.

So, there are cookies which I'd like to keep. On the other hand there are some which, while still legitimate, are not ones I want to encourage. Among these are cookies from a company named Doubleclick. You will probably have never been to their site, but, as they will tell you on their Web site, they gather information on the types of people who use the Internet and which sites they visit. It is little different (and more anonymous) to how Coles promotes FlyBuys so they can build a picture of their customers and what items they buy.

It is legal, and generally thought legitimate marketing, but, with the few exceptions I've mentioned, I prefer to avoid handing out such information. OK, we cancelled our FlyBuys membership when each statement showed we were losing points at a faster rate than we were gaining them, probably because we were tending to shop at other supermarkets to avoid the "FlyBuys?" question at checkouts.

Sometimes cookies collected while you are searching for items at a manufacturers site may be picked up by a retailer, and this may become more common. Recently the Slashdot site carried a report by someone who had been searching for information on Bluetooth adapters who then went to Amazon looking for something else
and found that he was immediately confronted with a top-of-the-page section offering Bluetooth products. It could have been a coincidence.

All this helps explain why I pounced on Cookie Monster. It's a small program, 418 Kb download, and it gathers cookie details from your browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, and to a limited extent, Opera, plus any Gecko-based browser and most built-in browsers in other programs if they are based on 1E, which most are.

When you install it you will get two icons: "Cookie Monster" and "Eat All Cookies". Your first step is to go to the program itself and select Options from the toolbar. You will usually see the details for your installed browsers, but you may have to select the browse button to find lesser known ones. For example, it did not find the
copy of K-Meleon I have installed.

Among options I selected were "save preserved cookies on exit" so I can keep those few cookies I do want. I now opt for an item in the System tray, a recent addition to the program, so I can quickly right-click and select "Eat cookies" after a browsing session.

You will need to go into the main program and select the cookies you specifically wish to keep, clicking the single green arrow to move them across from the "cookies found" window to the "preserved cookies" window. Then you can safely select "Eat those cookies!" from the shortcut or the system tray, knowing your selected
cookies remain safe.

If you visit a site that you know will set cookies you want, then you may decide to "eat cookies" before visiting, go to the site, and immediately afterwards call up Cookie Monster so that you can see the cookies that were set and copy them to your preserved list. This helps with many discussion forums where you can find you are recognised immediately you visit, avoiding the need for a log on every time. Whether this works or not depends on the life of the cookie as set by the forum. They can be set for just the current session, or for a period of time which may be in hours or days.

At the bottom of the preserved cookies list you may eventually see a few under a subheading of "Cookies preserved but not found". You can safely
leave these if you feel they may be needed as they are most likely cookies which had an expiry date. Next time you go to the site and collect the
cookie it will be preserved until that expiry date even though you may immediately eat all the other cookies.

Download Cookie Monster from http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/CookieMonster.php. There are other cookie control programs; many are intended just for deleting all tracks left from visiting questionable Web sites while others such as Cookie Spy do much of what Cookie Monster does though they are mostly concerned with blocking unwanted cookies (see http://camtech2000.net/Pages/CookieSpy_SE.htm .) Also you may want to look at the cookie control within browsers such as Firefox where the privacy control enables you to ban cookies while accepting those from specific sites.

Reprinted from the November 2006 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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