Bleh, Tracking Cookies


Alex.

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Aug 24, 2005
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Spybot S&D keeps detecting these Firefox tracking cookies:

DoubleClick
MediaPlex
Statcounter

I keep deleting them, and they keep coming back. From time to time my mouse cursor freezes for 1 or 2 seconds, could this have anything to do with it? My guess is not, but it's annoying having these little buggers on board to begin with.

It's my fault for not installing anti-spyware software until yesterday. So, any ideas? I also use Ad-aware, but that doesn't find anything. (and yes, I updated all detection rules for everything)

- Alex
 
Not sure to be honest; just wanted to chime in and suggest two additional programs to beef up your anti-spyware protection (they basically all catch different stuff).

AVG has a good one (formerly Ewido)
Also Spyware Blaster Is very useful to have considering it prevents spyware from entering your computer.

Also, I suggest running these programs in Safe Mode (I highly recommend doing this with AVG and Search and Destroy). One thing though- they will take a long time to complete in safe mode (at least an hour).

Good luck!
 
Tracking cookies will reappear anytime you go to a site that uses them, there's pretty much nothing you can do except delete them over and over.
 
To be honest there's nothing extremely bad about tracking cookies, they are only used to track your visits to a site or series of their sites. These cookies do not track every site you visit, nor can they steal your passwords to other sites.

A website initiates a cookie itself, it cannot access cookies from other sites, if it could, then the security of the Internet as a whole would collapse. Every time you come to a site like this, a cookie is temporarily created on your hard drive which is to do with your session data, it basically works like this:

I will explain this as simply as possible for the non technical among us. When a web server sends you a page, it forgets about you, so in order for you to appear logged onto a site like this forum for example it does the following: When you log on, a coded cookie is sent to you, each page you visit thereafter will send this cookie to the server, the server knows what session you are using and picks up the session variables connected to that session, it sends you the next page and resets the cookie time. If you log out then the session and the cookies are destroyed, also cookies have an automatic time out that is set by the server.

If it wasn't for cookies, sites like this wouldn't work correctly.
 
^^ yes, but the tracking cookies the anti-spyware programs tend to find are of a slightly (but only slightly) nastier variety that track you over multiple sites and send advertising to you based on the sites. No, they don't steal any data or anything, and they can only track you on sites that would give you the tracking cookie anyway. I like deleting them personally, but heh.
 
Just to point out and clarify to others: It's a misconception that tracking cookies can track every site you visit. Cookies are not program code only data. The only way cookies will be able to track every site you visit is if every web site registered itself with that cookie, which doesn't happen. The tracking cookies will only track you through the sites that the cookies came from, nothing more.
 
Turn off global cookie support and define exceptions for the sites where YOU actually need them (forum logins etc.). Only allow session cookies for sites where you don't want/need to stay logged in.

While you're at it, Flash has its own cookie-like mechanism - poke around here or just blow away the "\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player" directory regularly (logon script or similar).

If you're using Firefox 2.x, you might also want to read up on "client-side session and persistent storage" (go to about:config and set dom.storage.enabled to false to turn this stuff off for now).
 
Turn off global cookie support and define exceptions for the sites where YOU actually need them (forum logins etc.). Only allow session cookies for sites where you don't want/need to stay logged in.

While you're at it, Flash has its own cookie-like mechanism - poke around here or just blow away the "\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player" directory regularly (logon script or similar).

If you're using Firefox 2.x, you might also want to read up on "client-side session and persistent storage" (go to about:config and set dom.storage.enabled to false to turn this stuff off for now).
Interesting stuff but your average Internet user will not have the technical expertise to implement any of that. Good advice though.
 
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Personally, I like browsers like Konqueror that ask you the first time a domain tries to cookie you and you can choose to always allow cookies from that domain or never allow them. But Konqueror's javascript and plugin support are too weak for me to use it as a primary browser. So meh.
 
That's some great advice, thanks a lot everyone! I installed AVG and Spyware Blaster and they both work very well. I didn't know the Flash and Shockwave players set their own cookies, that explains the time when some flash apps kept their preferences even after I deleted all browser cookies. That's a pretty shitty move by Macromedia, sort of like Sony and their crazy formats, always moving away from the mainstream standards.

The mouse pointer still freezes for split seconds every now and then, so I guess this wasn't the problem causing it.

- Alex
 
Nah, Macromedia does that mostly out of necessity, I don't think that plugins can set their own browser cookies.
 
Frankly, I don't see much wrong with tracking cookies. I mean, I don't get advertisements anyway, thanks to Adblock.
 
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