Tracking cookies

[827haneghan]

Why doesn't Malwarebytes get rid of tracking cookies ? I bought another program - Hit Man Pro - that gets rid of these and if I only do it once a week there will be over a hundred of them .

[exile360]

Greetings,

The main reasons Malwarebytes doesn't remove cookies is because first, they aren't actually dangerous (i.e. they aren't malware) and while they are used for tracking, removing them after the fact does little to nothing to protect your privacy and blocking them would be a far more effective means of doing that (a feature built into all major browsers, so if you are concerned about privacy you may configure your browser to block cookies).  Second, all cookies can easily be removed either via a free temp file cleaning utility like CCleaner or through the built in history/temp file/cookie cleaning functionality in all browsers so scanning for and removing specific cookies via a malware scanner would be a waste of time.  There are also third party utilities that will block specific tracking cookies to protect privacy such as Spywareblaster which is free.

You can read more about what Malwarebytes thinks about cookies here.

Now, with all of that said, if you are concerned about your privacy then I would recommend installing the Malwarebytes browser extension beta which is currently available for free for both Chrome and Firefox because, in addition to blocking malicious websites, it also blocks many tracking servers (the very servers that would use those cookies to track your online activities) meaning that rather than reactively removing cookies after the fact once they have already likely been used to track your activities online, it proactively blocks connections to the servers that would attempt to use the data within those cookies to track you (in addition to other tracking methods that don't even use traditional cookies such as user agent profiling and browser fingerprinting which uses your software and hardware configuration to identify you without the need for a cookie, as well as "ever-cookies" which use alternate methods like the cache in Flash player, images stored in your temp files and other mechanisms like entropy that would not be detected by a cookie removal utility like HitmanPro).

Aside from this, there are also browser extensions like Ghostery, Disconnect, Privacy Badger, Adblock Plus, uBlock Origin and others that would better protect your privacy by blocking tracking cookies and/or tracking servers rather than just scanning for and removing them after the fact.

If you'd like to install the Malwarebytes browser extension or find out more about it you may do so at the following links:

Chrome
Firefox

It should work with any browsers based on Chromium such as Google Chrome, SRWare Iron and Vivaldi as well as Mozilla Firefox and beyond blocking the things I already mentioned, it also behaviorally blocks tech support scam sites, it blocks phishing sites and it also blocks clickbait sites as well as many web ads.

No privacy solution is perfect, however removing cookies after the fact does very little to guard your privacy, especially given the complex mechanisms and measures that big data collection organizations are using to track users and gather information.

If you have any questions or if there is anything else we might assist you with please let us know.

Thanks

Edited September 30, 2018 by exile360