Spyware and Cookies

As usual, Fred Langa's excellent newsletter alerted us this week to a new tool that you can use to help maintain your privacy. It's an online scanning version of PestPatrol that you can run to create a list of all of the cookies on your Windows directory that send back information to third parties. It detects, but does not delete (for free) the pernicious little text files that it finds. For that, they think, you'll want to spring $39.95 and change. But it does give you a list to work with, if you want to look them up and delete them by hand.

Along with Ad-Aware and Spybot, you have an excellent chance of outwitting these cookie depositors. Each of the programs mentioned seems to miss some spyware that another finds, so no single solution is comprehensive.

When you've done all you can to clean the place, you need to set your privacy setitngs in Internet Explorer (Tools-Internet Options-Privacy) to a higher setting. What you want, essentially, is to eliminate third-party cookies, and as you slide the slider upwards, you'll see an explanation of the settings. If it turns out to be too high, and you have trouble logging onto sites, you may want to back it off again, and regularly apply the above solutions. You might also consider Disk Cleaner, which we run automatically at the Lane Library computer lab. It's not selective about cookies, so you might have some trouble logging into some sites where cookies are set up to remember you.