Delete Browser Cookies

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Delete_... wired/index (Wired: Index 3 (Top Stories 2))

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The web knows who you are. It knows what which sites you like, what you search for and where you spend your time. By collating these and other bits of data, it's not hard to figure out quite a bit about you.

If that makes you nervous, you need to learn how to get rid of cookies and browse privately, without leaving a digital fingerprint everywhere you go.

Cookies are like digital leeches that websites inject into your web browser to collect and remember data. In some cases, cookies are quite benign and simple. In fact, cookies are what websites use to remember that you're logged into a particular site. But some cookies are less benign, tracking everything you search for and sending that data back to a central server.

Ostensibly such data is anonymized, but as several sets of leaked data have demonstrated: despite the anonymizing it is often easy to match users back to their data.
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The 'article' is somewhat limited.

When visiting my regular sites I usually allow direct cookies, blocking indirect cookies (IE 7). I don't think I've ever needed a session cookie.
Nevertheless, sometimes an Amazon or Doubleclick third party cookie sneaks in.

What's so great about deleting cookies ? If I'm not mistaken, it's possible for 'the web' to read your index.dat files.

Also, the issue of 'web bugs'/'web beacons' is not mentioned at all.

Or using a HOSTS file to block some tracking.

An 'advanced' guide for blocking Flash cookies as much as possible is also missing. I've locked down Flash as much as possible, but in some situations a Flash cookie gets past it.

 

Personally, I allow web and flash cookies, but delete all of them periodically (e.g., two or more times a day using R-Wipe&Clean) so that there is no continuity or persistency of tracking information across sessions.