I highly doubt if the heat on Facebook from the U.S. Congress grilling of its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has died down completely. Though I don’t think the #DeleteFacebook campaign is going anywhere, despite the fact some big-time corporations like Tesla and Playboy were aboard that ship and went ahead to delete their Facebook pages.
That said, the issue of your online data security remains a matter that you will have to roll up your sleeve and handle by yourself. You can’t trust these big corporations to treat your digital persona with the dignity you deserve, because from their end, you are just a commodity up for sale to the highest bidder.
Talking about your digital persona, did you know your browser is the biggest data harvesting machine? That is all thanks to those tiny little data stored on your computer from sites you visit online called cookies.
When you visit a website, you get bombarded by small bits of data called HTTP cookies. Your browser keeps them stored locally on your computer, and at the time they can be very helpful, especially if you keep visiting that particular website time and time again.
However, these cookies contains information not just useful to your browser, other websites too car read information from them. While some of these cookies were designed with the sole purpose of tracking down your online activities.
That is probably how Google is able to pull up such highly relevant (read highly targeted ad) based on a site you visited earlier. It is not out of paranoia that you get frightened of the fact that big tech corporations on the internet like Google, Facebook, and other online advertisement platforms big-wigs always seem to know what you are looking for, even before you run a Google-search for it.
Well, you will be glad to learn of this new Google Chrome browser extension that automatically deletes cookies from websites you have visited. Dubbed the Cookie AutoDelete, this Chrome extension has garnered a lot of positive reviews from users, and come highly recommended to those of us who want to crush the cookies.
As the name suggests, this extension, though it doesn’t do anything without your explicit permission, will enable you to delete cookies as soon as you close a tab for a particular website. It comes with the whitelist and greylists feature, where the former is for sites, which you want to retain cookies of, while the latter is for sites whose cookies you want to delete immediately.
To install the Cookie Autodelete on your Chrome browser, click here.