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by jmclnx 671 days ago
Yet another reason to purge cookies often :)

Everytime I log into a site that I want to buy something from, I always clear cache, cookies, logins before and after using that site.

Yes it can be a PITA, but I think that stops other sites from looking to see what WEB sites you really care about.

4 comments

Install a cookie autodelete extension. That will let you whitelist cookies you want for persistent logins and discard the rest. They can usually be configured to purge on tab closing.
Autodelete is old tech if you ask me. If you open the sites before the autodelete happens, then the tracking still happens. Temporary Containers is an addon that solves this elegantly.
This may be dumb:

Wouldnt an "AI-Container-as-A-Browser" be nifty:

Create a container that runs with an AI agent that does your browsing "for you" whereby it does the connection, cookie management, anonymously tor' wrapping as required/set/needed such that you have an abstraction between you and all your browsing, and the browser can dev/null the ads and never let them render and poison the reply with synthetic data crafting all packets that go back to the cookie providers?

I also want ti to auto crawl an delete PII from all ad / identity brokers / white-pages/scam-spam. a "Delete me from the internet" bot

I really really want this.

That really is like how Stallman is described to use the internet, just with AI.

Regarding deletion, did you know about this service? https://joindeleteme.com/

Yeah but no. I want to know how to instruct gptbots to spit out actionable code snippets that I can run to have delete stuff. I dont want to pay an Opterly, or join-delete-me a monthly subscription to delete my footprint.

I know their services are valuable, im not against them - I am saying that in the age of GPT-code-slave-bots I'd rather learn the process of figuring out how to tell the AI what I want and I also iteratively learn through the process.

Its wonderful being able to explore ideas so fluidly with the GPTs even though we know/discover their limitations, mal-intent, and other filters/guardrails/alignments and allegiances

> I am saying that in the age of GPT-code-slave-bots I'd rather learn the process of figuring out how to tell the AI what I want and I also iteratively learn through the process.

Why?

It's your choice, but everyone knows AI is like poison for deterministic problem-solving. Learning how to better rely on an unreliable machine only guarantees that you're feeble when you have to do something without it. Like relying on autopilot when you don't know how to fly a plane, or trying to get HAL-9000 to open the airlock when you weren't trained on the manual process.

Using AI to automate takedown requests is just pointless. The only reason automated takedowns work is that their automated messages are canned and written by lawyers with a user as the signatory. If you have AI agents write custom and non-binding requests to people that hold your data, nobody will care. At that point you may as well copy-and-paste the messages yourself and save the hassle of correcting a brainless subordinate.

> Its wonderful being able to explore ideas so fluidly with the GPTs even though we know/discover their limitations, mal-intent, and other filters/guardrails/alignments and allegiances

It's as if the first-world has rediscovered the joy of reading, after a brief affair with smartphones, media paranoia and a couple election cycles dominated by misinformation bubbles. Finally, an unopinionated author with no lived-experience to frame their perspective! It's just what we've all been waiting for (besides the bias).

Block third party cookies will end most tracking. Block their JS and you get the benefit of a faster browser.
I do that as well. The full setup is Firefox with Strict protection, Multi-Account containers, Temporary Containers, Privacy Settings, Decentraleyes, and uBO. What's unfortunate is I start getting sites that don't like this treatment at all. IKEA straight-up tells me that I'm probably a bot so it won't let me log in, but other sites have random broken functionality as well.
If you’d like to, feel free to reach out to me on robin.whittleton@ingka.ikea.com so that we can try to fix that IKEA behaviour. Or file an issue on webcompat.com and I’ll track it from there.
What is the benefit of an extension over just configuring your browser to delete cookies by default?
> That will let you whitelist cookies you want for persistent logins and discard the rest
What browser can't do that?
I don't see a way to exclude certain site cookies from deletion in Chrome. Which browser have you seen with this option?
Cookie Autodelete can trigger on tab close rather than app exit
I use Firefox with Temporary Containers. Each tab is a brand new context automatically. Tabs don't talk to each other, each of them is separate - although, if you want, you can open a new tab in the same context, and even make permanent contexts. Closed tabs' contexts get purged after some minutes.
I've opted to just incognito the majority of my browsing. Likewise it's annoying to keep logging in and sometimes I wish I had something from my history. On the other hand, I never have to worry about cookies
Except even incognito persists and shares cookies across all incognito sessions for as long as at least one incognito window is open. Cookies will not be erased until you close every window.
Yep. So if I'm in a mood for music, YouTube learns what vibe I'm going for. Full algorithmic power bends to my will. Then I close the browsers and get a clean slate. Perfect
Firefox has an old slightly broken feature that wipes all cookies, except from a set of origins you whitelist. It actually saved me about half a gigabyte of pure cookie nonsense and made website loading quite a bit faster. Soon after I set it up, they announced their third-party cookie sandboxing, but I still think there's no reason to keep all the adtech trash on your computer in any capacity.

about:preferences -> Privacy & Security -> Cookies and Site Data -> [x] Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed -> Manage Exceptions

Just don't forget to back up your `~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default-release/cookies.sqlite*` beforehand.