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The web knows who you are. It knows what which sites you like, what you search for, where you spend your time and collating these and other bits of data, it's not hard to figure out quite a bit about you.
If that makes you nervous, you need to learn how to get rid of cookies and browse privately, without leaving a digital fingerprint everywhere you go.
Cookies are like digital leeches that websites inject into your web browser to collect and remember data. In some case cookies are quite benign and simple remember that you're logged into to particular site. But some cookies are less benign, tracking for example everything you search for and sending that data back to a central server.
Ostensibly such data is anonymized, but as several sets of leaked data have demonstrated it is, despite the anonymizing often easy to match users back to their data.
== Getting rid of Cookies ==
Exactly how you delete cookies depend on which browser you're using. Here's step for four of the most popular web browsers.
* '''Internet Explorer''' - Open the Internet Options panel and select the general tab. in the middle of panel you'll see options to delete cookies, click the button and your cookies are gone.
* '''Firefox''' - Head to Preference and click the privacy tab. There you'll see option to view and delete cookies. You'll also find options to control which sites are allowed to set cookies and how long those cookies should be kept. If you're serious about stopping cookies, be sure to check out the [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5207 CS Lite add-on] which offers excellent cookie and privacy controls.
* '''Safari''' - To delete cookies in Safari, head to the Safari menu and choose "Reset Safari." A dialog box will pop up giving you the option to delete all sorts of data; make sure "Remove all cookies" is checked and hit the reset button.
* '''Chrome''' - Click the wrench menu and select options. Then click the Under the Hood tab and look for "Privacy" where you'll find the cookie settings section, To delete all cookies from the list, click Remove all.
== Keeping Cookies out of your browser ==
Okay, you've deleted the cookies you've accumulated as you move around the web, but how do you keep them out? Well, in some cases you're not going to be able to, but tools like Firefox's [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5207 CS Lite add-on] can help.
All of the browsers listed above support some kind of "private browsing" mode, which make your browser much more incognito, denying cookies and not keeping track of where you go (note that in case of Internet Explorer you'll need to using version 8 or better to use private browsing).
==Future Outlook==
Already legal protections are starting to make their way into governments everywhere and a number of high profile companies have already pledge to cut back on the amount of data they collect.
Still, the future of cookies and online privacy looks bleakly Orwellian. Already sites are turning to Flash-based cookies and other tricks that make it even harder to cover your online tracks.
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