“Show Me Your Cookie And I Will Tell You Who You Are“

-Vincent Toubiana and Vincent Verdot

In my previous article the quest for privacy, I spoke of changing my habits to protect against surveillance. There are tools you can use, such as open source software as well as browsers extensions and add-ons that protect from tracking cookies, and any other unauthorized surveillance.

“Show Me Your Cookies” painting by JohnnyDollar

The first step in taking back sovereignty over one’s data, is the realization of just how much you are being tracked and by whom.

Let’s start with the basic http cookie. Cookies are small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user’s computer by the user’s web browser while browsing. There are various types of cookies useful for shopping carts, authentication, keeping you logged into a site as you go from page to page and lot’s of other functions that make the internet more useful.

Cookies serve lots of legitimate purposes and allow many websites better functionality, but there are many tracking cookies coming from all sorts of 3rd party sites that you never visited, some add serious vulnerabilities to user’s machine, let alone the user’s privacy.

And even legit cookie from trusted sites visited may set temporary session cookie that continue tracking for outrageous amounts of times sometimes twenty or fifty years. Obviously, not as temporary as the name would apply.

Lightbeam, a beautiful extension that builds a visual log of cookies from sites you visited and surprise third-party trackers. built by Mozilla developer Atul Varma and designed by student at Emily Carr University of Art and Design