Not all cookies are bad. But which ones should your browser block?

Third-party cookies track users’ surfing behaviour to find out their interests. — 123rf.com

THERE are plenty of Internet browsers to choose from – Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari – and they all do the job well.

However, your surfing habits and personal information about you will also be passed on to other companies if you don’t pay attention.

“Browsers collect data. On the one hand, this leads to more comfort when surfing, but it also means less privacy protection,” says browser specialist Arne Arnold.

To collect information about you and your preferences, advertising companies, for example, use third-party cookies to track users’ surfing behaviour and find out their interests.

These cookies are then saved by the browser and used to give you personalised ads.

“But this tracking can be blocked. Some browsers like Safari, Firefox and Edge can do this out of the box.

“To do this, the tracking blockers only have to be activated in the settings under ‘Data protection and security’,” says IT industry journalist Jo Bager.

Cookies are small text files through which a user is recognised when the person visits a page again. They are not bad per se – they make surfing easier because they ensure that the same data does not have to be re-entered every time you visit a page.

If you block all cookies, your surfing will not be as smooth.

“That would mean, for example, that a shopping site like Amazon would no longer be able to store a shopping cart,” says IT specialist Dennis Kochinky.

That’s why it makes sense to block only certain cookies.

Arnold advises blocking third-party cookies: “In this way you can prevent entire advertising networks from tapping the data.”

In Chrome, an important setting – “Preload pages in order to speed up surfing and searching” – can be found under “Data protection and security”, which is activated by default.

“If this setting is activated, Chrome can automatically call up websites and the user receives cookies from these pages, even if they do not visit them at all,” Kochinky warns. So it makes sense to deactivate the setting.

All this data collection is because of the business models of the browser makers.

“Google lives from advertising. The Chrome browser therefore tracks everything that is going on. Firefox, in turn, earns money by using Google as a search engine,” Arnold explains.

For that reason he advises Firefox users to deselect Google as the default search engine and instead use a search engine such as Startpage.

“The search results are the same, but the personal data is filtered out,” he says.

Another tip is to enable incognito mode if the computer is a public one or is used by several people.

This mode means that “no history is created in the browser and no cookies are saved”, Kochinky explains.

However, he warns that incognito mode, also known as private mode, doesn’t mean that you’re surfing anonymously.

“The incognito mode does not hide surfing activities from the employer or Internet provider, for example. This requires a VPN service, for example,” he says.

Caution is advised with browser extensions (add-ons).

“The problem is many browser extensions can be granted extensive rights by the user in order to be able to function,” Bager says.

The downside is that extensions can also track the user and some have also been used to launch attacks.

All of the common browsers offer many options for protecting your privacy under settings, although some browsers are better at this than others.

“The Safari browser, which is only available for macOS and iOS, and Firefox offer the best protection by default,” Bager says.

Google recently announced that it will stop collecting third-party cookies and instead use an anonymised cohort system to identify user groups for advertising purposes.

Bager, however, is sceptical that this will make much difference: “Google will continue to work hard to collect data, and the Chrome browser won’t be any exception.” – dpa