Tool Time Friday | Need a little more Privacy?

Better Privacy serves to protect against undeletable longterm cookies, a new generation of ‘Super-Cookie’, which silently conquered the internet. This new cookie generation offers unlimited user tracking to industry and market research. Concerning privacy Flash- and DOM Storage objects are most critical.

This addon was made to make users aware of those hidden, never expiring objects and to offer an easy way to get rid of them – since browsers are unable to do that for you.

Flash-cookies (Local Shared Objects, LSO) are pieces of information placed on your computer by a Flash plugin. Those Super-Cookies are placed in central system folders and so protected from deletion. They are frequently used like standard browser cookies. Although their thread potential is much higher as of conventional cookies, only few users began to take notice of them. It is of frequent occurrence that -after a time- hundreds of those Flash-cookies reside in special folders. And they won’t be deleted – never!

BetterPrivacy can stop them, e.g. by allowing to silently remove those objects on every browser exit. So this extension becomes sort of “install and forget add-on”. Usually automatic deletion is safe (no negative impact on your browsing), especially if the deletion timer is activated. The timer can delay automatic deletion for new or modified Flash-cookies which might be in use. It also allows to delete those objects immediately if desired.

With BetterPrivacy it is possible to review, protect or delete new Flash-cookies individually. Users who wish to to manage all cookies manually can disable the automatic functions. BetterPrivacy also protects against ‘DOM Storage’ longterm tracking, a browser feature which has been granted by the major browser manufactures.

Awesome tool!