It’s been said that only the paranoid survive. Do you need to be a little paranoid about cookies? To paraphrase, if everyone is out to track you, paranoia is the right attitude to have. And everyone is out to track you when you’re online.
Manage Cookies? Or, Kill Cookies?
For Mac users, cookies are those snippets of information that a web site leaves on your browser. Cookies can be read and updated. They’re the perfect spyware tool. Or, the tool you need to shop online. Most cookies are benign. Many are not.
Should you manage cookies? Or, simply kill cookies?
You could make a good argument either way, but cookie management also implies killing some cookies, so let’s move in that direction. Cookie Stumbler Express is an inexpensive Mac app that can eliminate advertising and other tracking cookies. Why? Privacy. How? Click to scan, then manage browser cookies.
Cookie Stumbler Express works on most major Mac browsers (Safari, Firefox, Chrome, et al) and is simple to set up, but less simple to use to manage cookies.
The Home screen gives you options to keep or delete cookies. How do you know which cookies to keep or kill? That’s a more difficult question, but Cookie Stumbler Express identifies advertising cookies.
You can schedule Cookie Stumbler Express to run behind the scenes to check your browsers and update you with changes.
As an added bonus, Cookie Stumbler Express also provides a few browser maintenance functions. These include cleaning various and sundry browser caches and databases. That improves security, too.
The app works in the background to track and clean cookies, but also uses Cookie Definitions which are downloaded from time to time to enhance and improve the detection process.
Sounds good, right? It works by itself if you want it to. It tracks, it deletes, it cleans. It even deletes the so-called Permanent Storage Cookie that’s all the rage with YouTube, Hulu, and other sites. The price is nominal but there’s an ongoing annual fee, instead of a single price forever. That’s the price of privacy. And paranoia.