Which Cookies Do You Want?

by Bonnie Boots

Sometimes I think learning the language of technology is the hardest part of doing business on the web. Like this: in the real world, we’re crazy about cookies and scared of spiders. In the cyber world, we try to attract spiders and keep people from giving us cookies.

Need help translating? Spiders are little programs that feed pages to search engines. It’s called a spider because it crawls all over the web. Attracting them to your site is a good thing because it helps search engines find and index all the content you’ve worked so hard to provide.

Cookies, on the other hand, are a small file that’s deposited on your computer’s hard drive. Cookies store information about you and your computer, such as your IP address. Your IP address is the unique number that identifies your computer when it connects to other computers.

Cookies can be good or bad. Good cookies save you the trouble of logging in when you connect to sites where you’re a frequent visitor. A cookie is what allows a web site to greet you by name every time you return and it’s a cookie that allows Amazon.com to show you a selection of books you might enjoy whenever you visit.

Bad cookies, on the other hand, are placed by people that don’t necessarily have your best interests at heart. Advertising companies place many cookies on computers. These files record where you’ve been and what you’ve done on the internet and report back to whomever planted them.

Bad cookies can slow down your computer, expose you to annoying pop-ups and other advertising and put you at risk for identity theft by stealing passwords and credit card numbers.

It’s good computer housekeeping to pay attention to the cookies that get planted on your computer. You should check on them regularly and ask yourself “Which cookies do I want to keep?

If you’re one of the 68% of computer users that don’t use a security program like Norton or Symantec that monitor cookies, you will benefit from a hugely popular piece of freeware that will identify and destroy unwanted cookies at your command. It’s called Ad-Aware SE, and it’s available at no cost from the good folks at Lavasoft.

As their web sites says, “At Lavasoft we believe that every individual, regardless of economic status or geographic location, should have the power to control their individual privacy and security. Lavasoft is the original anti-spyware company, and we are still delivering the best protection today. After all, over 300 million computer users around the world can’t be wrong!”

Ad-Aware SE lets you monitor your cookies and wipe out any you don’t want or don’t recognize. You’d probably want to leave the Amazon and eBay cookies, for instance, and blast away the implant from PornoNow.

Your first step in protecting yourself is downloading and installing the software. The download page is here:

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

Download the program to a location on your hard drive that you will be able to find later. When the download is finished, navigate to that file and double click on it. When the file open, follow the simple installation wizard until you see the screen that says, “Ad-Aware SE has been successfully installed.”

 Now you can send the install file to your recycle bin, then find the Ad-Aware SE icon on your desktop and click it to open the program. It will appear on your desktop looking like this:

This is the Status screen. The status button is shown here marked in red. The status screen shows current information about the program. The HELP button, located on the lower left, will open a good help file that will explain the features of the program and how to use them.

Essentially, all you need to do is click on the SCAN NOW button, marked here in red.

The Preparing System Scan screen will ask you to choose a scan mode. The first time you run the program, you should choose FULL SYSTEM SCAN. (Thereafter, you can choose smart system scan.)

Click the NEXT button in the lower right and Ad-Aware SE will instantly begin scanning your hard drive, looking for cookies that have been deposited. The time it takes to complete this scan will depend on the size of your hard drive and how infested it is. The first time I ran Ad-Aware SE, the full system scan took 30 minutes. After that, I was able to use the shorter Smart System scan, which takes less than 3 minutes on my system.

In this next picture, you can see that the scan has finished running on my system. Ad-Aware SE found 15 critical new objects and is alerting me with a flashing red exclamation point. This is so I’ll know it means business!

By clicking on “Show Logfile” on the bottom of the screen, I am taken to the Scanning Results screen.

Here, using the tabs, I can choose to see the scan summary, the list of critical objects, the negligible objects and the scan log.  This picture shows the list of critical objects, which are all tracking devices.

The only one I recognize and want to keep is the cookie that identifies me to Clickbank. By placing a check mark in the box in front of this cookie and right clicking on my mouse, I am able to choose from a menu offering that says, “Ignore this object.” (It’s marked with a little ladybug.) When I click this option, the Clickbank cookie is removed from the Critical Objects list and placed on a new list, one that tells ad-Aware SE the Clickbank cookie is benign and can always be ignored.

After looking over the critical objects and the negligible objects and moving the Clickbank cookie to the ignore list, I’m ready to quarantine everything else Ad-Aware SE found on my system. To do this, I can place a check mark in the box in front of each object I want quarantined. OR I can right-click on the screen and choose “Select All Objets.”  Then I click the NEXT button.

Ad-Aware SE will then present a screen asking if I would like to have the selected objects removed.  When I press the OK buttton, ad-Aware SE moves all the selected items into a quarantine box and returns me to the STATUS screen.

My status screen now records the date of this scan and tells me I have one item on my ignore list. Everything else has been placed on a quarantine list.

 The quarantine file takes up hard drive space, so eventually it will be a good idea to clean it out by destroying everything in it.  Before doing this, though, it’s a good idea to use your computer for some time to make sure any of the items you have quarantined did not damage the functionality of any programs you need to use. By placing items in quarantine, Ad-Aware SE lets you retrieve anything you might have selected in error. You can go into the quarantine area, find it and unblock it.

If you find your computer runs without problems, as is likely to be the case, then the last thing you should do is mark your calendar with a reminder to run Ad-Aware SE in 30 days. When you open Ad-Aware SE at that time, it will ask you to allow it to connect to the internet in order to update its security definitions. Tell the program “Yes” by clicking on the “Connect” button. It will download and install its own updates. Do this each time you run the program. Afterward, click on the quarantine list and tell Ad-Aware SE to destroy it. Now run the smart scan to check your hard drive.

 If you update and run Ad-Aware SE every 30 days, you take a big step towards keeping your personal information private and done your part to clean adware off the internet. And for that, you have my permission to reward yourself with a chocolate chip cookie!

About the Author

Bonnie Boots is the publisher/editor of The Internet Wizards Magazine for people who want to create their own products and market on the internet. Register for your free 1-year subscription at http://www.theinternetwizards.com