Cookies are a common part of the internet today. Used in web sites both large and small, cookies can help improve usability, track user behavior, store customized settings and much much more. As useful as they are, not all web sites can be trusted to use cookies responsibly. Some web sites use cookies to spy on their users and even worse, allow third-parties to place cookies on your computer without warning.
It’s true. As innocent as those little text files may seem, they greatly reduce your privacy on the internet by allowing web sites to keep track of what you are doing as you browse the web. In the most extreme cases cookies can also be used to exploit weaknesses in older browsers, leading to security problems.
Fortunately, most modern web browsers make it easy to delete cookies and help restore your privacy on the internet. Every web browser stores and handles cookies differently, thus, the process to delete cookies is different from one browser to the next. In our Web Browsers portal we’ve written several step-by-step guides explaining How to Delete Cookies in Modern Web Browsers.
For further reading on internet safety and browser security we highly recommend Browse Happy, a site dedicated to educating people about the risks associated with insecure browsers like Internet Explorer. For a more technical and in-depth look at how to secure your web browser, head over to CERT.org and read Securing Your Web Browser.