Everyone is watching what you do online. How user tracking with cookies works

So a cookie only knows the website that referred me?

So if I copy paste the website in the address bar, they dont learn anything about my last browsing habit?

At work I am forced to use Internet Explorer, and by using it I found a surprisingly useful feature: I can not only clock all third party cookies, but it prompts me as to whether I want a first party to store any cookies. The prompt allow allows me to automatically blacklist a site from providing me any cookies. I really enjoy this, as if I know there is a site I will never log into, I can permanently blacklist it with one click. I tried to see if I can do the same but I did not find this feature on Firefox.

I have also noted that certain sites will be very user hostile if you do this. Reddit will load the site and actually overlay a white screen to make it appear like it never loads if you block its cookies.

Thank you! Great vulgarization...

I'll share that with my non-IT colleagues!

This revelation should be front page on every newspaper. That IT companies have been hiding these things inside our computers is a violation of our privacy, even our property rights. How muck electricity has been used by these things, electricity I pay for. Either Google needs to reimburse me for hosting their "cookies" or we need to ban cookies altogether.

https://torproject.org/

The information is stored within your web browser, so the instructions to view it will depend on what OS and browser combination you use. In Google Chrome for example, you can view cookies in the Developer Tools (F12, or Menu -> More Tools -> Developer Tools), under the Applications tab. This will show you the cookies visible to the website in your current browser tab. Firefox's developer tools have similar capabilities; I don't know the instructions for other browsers offhand though.

Cookies are sent to the website by your browser automatically when you visit pages. This is usually limited to the cookies belonging to the domain that set them, but the rules allow some flexibility for cross origin sharing. When you hear about tracking cookies, these are most commonly set by an embedded iframe; these can use a different domain from the page that embeds them, and in the case of ad networks this domain is often shared among many sites. These cookies present the largest potential danger to privacy, as they allow a third-party domain to track some browsing behaviors on the host sites in a way that isn't obvious to the user, and this can be used to build up a profile about the sites that user visits most frequently.

If you clear your history in your browser, the website will see no cookies from your browser on the next request. Most sites will simply set a new set of cookies immediately, treating you as a new visitor. You can instruct most browsers to automatically clear your cookies when you exit. Browsers which use a "private browsing" mode also typically use a separate cookie store, so they won't send any cookies from your regular session. From a tracker's point of view, this creates sort of a second user, and in theory should separate that activity from your main accounts. (In practice this can be easily circumvented with browser fingerprinting if a tracker is particularly determined.)

Not all cookies are bad, mind. They're one of the earliest widely adopted implementations of "local storage" for websites, and for a time they were the only reliable way a site could remember a visitor between requests. The most visible effect of clearing your cookies is usually logging you out of everything, since most sites still store your session this way.