Cookies, Clickstream Technologies, and Privacy

Rejecting Cookies

IE and Netscape Navigator allow users to turn off cookies, but often times this causes sites to stall further use until you revert to the original configuration. In this sense, there seems to be a tradeoff between privacy and access. On many web servers, cookies force users to be vulnerable about their personal information for the sake of using the website's services.

There are methods of preventing cookies being written on your hard-drive. For example:

under Unix, choose one of:
- ln -sf /dev/null ~/.netscape/cookies
- chmod 0400 ~/.netscape/cookies
- change ACCEPT_COOKIE in ~/.netscape/preferences to '2'
on a Mac:
- replace the 'MagicCookie' file in System Folder:Preferences:Netscape f with a folder of the same name
under Windows:
- set the file in which the cookies are stored to be read-only
- insert a line in autoexec.bat, or equivalent start-up script, which implements . (Of course, this doesn't provide any protection during a session) http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/Cookies.html#Appl

However, net-browsers commonly store cookies in main memory, so preventing them from being deposited on the hard drive may not entirely prevent cookies from being used.