Usually, my scorn, my irritation, my peeve, is directed at the ACT Government and their relentless building apartments, or the weather which has decided to turn the sky into a permanent grey sponge. But today, my rage has a new target.
It is the internet. Or more specifically a constant irritation (and not to mention possible pitfall) of having to administer your cookie settings every time you have the temerity to open a webpage.
You know exactly what I am talking about I am sure. You open a page to find out something perfectly simple—say, what happened to the Spoon collection craze or why the train between Canberra and Sydney is getting slower—and instead of words, you are greeted by a massive, screen-blocking digital wall.
It demands that you update your “Cookie Settings.”
“We value your privacy,” the website lies. They don’t value your privacy at all. If they valued your privacy, they wouldn’t have built a digital tracking system that would make the East German Stasi blush.
Now, what most people do at this point—because we live in a world where everyone is in a hurry and our attention spans have been reduced to that of a concussed gnat—is look at the giant blue button that says “Select All” or “Accept All Cookies.” And they click it.
They click it just to make the bloody box go away.
But you shouldn’t.
Clicking “Select All” is, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst thing you can do whilst in a web browser…well maybe the second worst. It is the digital equivalent of walking into a pub, handing your wallet to a bloke named “Shifty Dave,” giving him your house keys, and saying, “Here you go, mate, do what you like, I’m just going to have a pint.”
When you click “Select All,” you aren’t just agreeing to let the website remember that you like reading about history. You are giving permission to three hundred and forty-seven sinister, shadowy advertising corporations based in Delaware or Bucharest to follow you around the internet like a pack of starved wolves.
They want to know:
- What time you wake up.
- How long you looked at that photo of a leather jacket.
- Whether your search history suggests you have an embarrassing medical condition.
If you click “Select All,” they will package that information up, sell it, and use it to bombard you with adverts for hair loss treatments and luxury villas in Portugal until the day you die. It is a total invasion of your life… and all because you went on that website for a sponge recipe.
Fortunately, there is a way to stop these internet parasites in their tracks. It requires a tiny bit of effort, but the satisfaction of denying a tech billionaire his data is immense.
Here is exactly how you handle the cookie monsters, step by step:
Opening the website you might be presented with something that looks like this.
In most cases the banner is balanced and fair but a few deliberately make it easier to Accept All than to Edit… but don’t be discouraged.
Always click Edit or Customise
Once there it is just a case of making sure that the essential cookies are on and everything else is off.
The essential cookies are the ones that legitimately make sure experience with that website better.
And that is it. Job done.
You have told the advertising world to bugger off, you have kept your data to yourself, and you can read your article in peace. It takes an extra five seconds of your life, yes. But those five seconds are a glorious, triumphant victory for the little man against the global machine.
Now, this is what you might want to do the next time you are presented with this unwelcome intrusion but while you are waiting for that, you might want to prep your Safari so it has a clean slate.
Here is how you do it, depending on which particular flavor of internet pipeline you prefer.
Safari: The California Way
If you use a Mac, you almost certainly use Safari. It is sleek, it is elegant.
Because Apple likes everything to look utterly seamless, they hide the giant, brutal buttons you actually need. They don’t want you ruining their pristine aesthetic by fiddling with the plumbing. But fiddle we must.
To micro-manage Safari’s digital storage tenants, follow this precise sequence:
Open Safari.
Click on Safari in the main menu bar at the very top, and then select Settings… (or Preferences if your Mac is getting on a bit).
Go to Privacy, the padlock icon.
A window pops up. Ignore all the generic options and click on the Privacy tab.
Right there in the middle, you will see a button labeled Manage Website Data…. Click it.
Once you click that button, Safari will pause for a moment while it compiles a massive list of every single company that has set up camp on your computer.
It is brilliant. You can see exactly who is storing what. If you spot a website you don’t trust, or a weird blog you visited months ago that is taking up space, you simply click on it, and hit the Remove button at the bottom. The corporate tracking script is immediately kicked out into the cold, while your important login cookies remain entirely untouched.
Firefox: The Open-Source Workshop
Then we move on to Firefox. Firefox is not built by an all-powerful mega-corporation. It is built by an army of independent tech-nerds who probably sleep in hammocks and survive entirely on a diet of black coffee and moral superiority.
Because of this, Firefox doesn’t hide its gears and cogs behind smooth aluminum panels. It lays them all out on the table and invites you to hit them with a wrench. It gives you an industrial-strength interface to micromanage every single kilobyte.
In Firefox, the process is delightfully robust:
Click the three horizontal lines in the top right corner to open the menu, and click Settings.
Head straight to Privacy & Security on the left-hand side. It has a nice, reassuring padlock icon.
Scroll down to the section boldly titled Clear Browsing Data and click to reveal all the websites that have tabs on you and click on Removal All.
Click on Save Changes and then Clear Now.
