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Cookies

  • 1 April 2019
  • 5 replies
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Which of webroot's utilities delete cookies cookies from applications?
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Best answer by NicCrockett 3 April 2019, 17:24

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Userlevel 7
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Cookies are harmless: https://wiki.awin.com/index.php/Are_Cookies_dangerous%3F

HTH,
Userlevel 7
Hi wr-help-jn

Welcome to the Community Forums.

Only WRSA Complete or Antivirus for Gamers have the System Optimizer feature that will delete Flash Cookies...but only Flash Cookies.

Most of us here use CCleaner (from Piriform) as our principal cookie cleaner if we are at all bothered by having them on our systems.

Hope that helps?

Regards, Baldrick
Userlevel 7
Badge +28
Like @Baldrick, I suggest using CCleaner. However, they did get hacked awhile back. I'm not telling you this to scare you away, but to warn you to get it from either the actual site and to get the latest version. This way you don't the infected version floating out there on the web. Also, be careful using it. It's a very powerful program that can hurt your system if you run certain options. If you install it and it has options to install other programs, make sure you uncheck those options during the install process.

The article that @TripleHelix posted is mostly correct. However, I'm a web developer and I know at least one of those options isn't correct. Here's a few additional things to think about when it comes to cookies:

  1. Access Personal Info - The article mentions not being able to access personal info. If I have a form on my site and you enter your data into it, I can write that to a cookie. Generally this isn't going to be the case because web developers generally don't handle forms this way, but it is possible.
  2. Tracking Cookies - If you visit Site A and it has a Facebook widget on it, Facebook creates a cookie. Next you visit Site B that also has a Facebook widget and now Facebook can use it's tracking cookie to track your habits from site to site. This helps them to do targeting advertising to all their users. This is so I get ads for the movie releases and you get ads for whatever you're interested in.
  3. HDD Space - This isn't a big deal and can easily be fixed. However, all browsers are going to use a certain amount of storage for cookies and caching of images, scripts, etc. With the size of today's hard drives (HDD) or solid state drives (SSD), this generally isn't a big deal. However, you might want to go into all your browsers and tell it to use a smaller amount of space. The benefit to this is that it will help refresh some of the sites you go to more often. It's possible that you're visiting a site that made a change to their site, but you have a cached version of their javascript file from a year ago, so it's not refreshing unless they have a mechanism to force it or you're telling it to. Another benefit is that it will get rid of things like images that the site has taken off. You still have them saved in your cache, but you don't need to load them because they got rid of them. I'm not 100% certain, but I don't think cookies are cleared out until their expiration date.
  4. Clear History - This is the same as HDD Space, but it's manually telling the browser to clear all the history or past a certain time period. The one difference is, this option can clear cookies. CCleaner will help this if you use it.
Hope this was helpful and good luck!
Userlevel 7
Badge +28
@MarkRCasas,

Unfortunately cookies are a part of the internet. Some sites require them to work. I can suggest that if you don't want all the cookies you've collected since you started using the browser, use the browser's built-in history clean-up tool. This way you can tell it to delete anything older than today, 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year ago. Those are common time frames and may vary from browser to browser, but I think you get the idea. Picking today might be to soon, but 3 months might be ok. If you've been to the site within 3 months the cookie should have refreshed itself and won't be deleted. Therefore you'll still have the cookie the next time you visit the site and it should work. I'll admit, I'm taking a guess since I don't know how their site is built. However, that's general website behavior if they are following the rules.

Good Luck!
What can you advise the application, except for CCleaner? I tried to clean cookies with the help of CCleaner, when I had to make several accounts on (Link Removed ~ PTD) in order to get free games for each account. But CCleaner did not solve my problem, I was immediately banned and I can not register. Thank you.

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