To follow on from yesterday's post and the helpful comments left by Wayne, Steve and Carolyn, I thought it might be helpful just to give a couple of pointers about browser privacy. This is not a definitive guide, and will not apply to all browsers in the same way... it's more to get you thinking about the topic, in case you weren't already.
First, how long is it since you last had a look at your privacy settings? If, like me, you've recently accepted an upgrade to your browser, it might be worth revisiting them (like I didn't... but hey, profit from my mistakes...). Check your cookie settings and see if they really reflect what you're happy to disclose. Have a browse through the cookies which are currently stored. You might be surprised at how many there are, and how many are for sites you don't recognise.
Next, some Firefox-specific things:
There are a couple of useful extensions; the "Permit Cookies" extension and the Netcraft toolbar. The former is a simple hot-key pop-up which means you can turn cookies off by default and then re-enable them on a site-by-site basis by hitting Alt-C. I should warn you... you might find a surprising number of sites stop working in some way when you turn off all cookies (for instance, some sites will want to set a cookie in order for you to log in)- but just being aware of that is quite useful in itself.
The latter is an anti-phishing toolbar which gives you an indication of the risk rating assigned to the sites you visit. There are some other neat gadgets too, such as a "what's that site running" function.
Then you might want to type "Firefox about:config tweaks" into a search engine and check out some of the options there. Here are a couple of the useful pages you are likely to see in the hitlist: Mozillazine knowledgebase, 10 privacy tips.
Let me know how you get on... or if you have other favourite privacy tools.
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