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Welcome, this video explains some background information about Cookies
and their threats and how they can be managed with MAXA Cookie Manager.
Cookies allow a website to save information on your computer. Together with the site's
content, they can send any additional information they want to be saved on your computer. When
you visit the site later again, previously stored information is automatically sent back
to the site, which allows it to recognize you.
Cookies can be a useful tool, as they allow websites to remember your login data or other
preferences you made.
However they are a threat to your privacy: Cookies used by large ad-networks allow to
find out which sites you are looking at, which products you may be interested in, and create
a profile of your browsing habits.
Deleting Cookies within the browser used to help, by the cost of maybe losing useful cookies.
However new kinds of cookies have emerged: Browser independent Cookies!
Their most widespread variant are the Flash cookies, as the flash player software is installed
on almost all machines. Let's look at an example: Here's a Youtube video opened in internet
explorer. We'll set the volume to a specific value, close the tab and delete the cookies.
We switch to Firefox and confirm no cookies are there. However, when we open the same
video in Firefox, you can see that the volume has the same level as it had in Internet Explorer.
How is this possible? Well, a Flash cookie has been set. This is a cookie that resides
outside of the browser's cookie cache and lives on YOUR PC! And, you know what's worse?
They never expire!
All information a website can learn about you and your browsing habits, can be linked
together with the help of these cookies. So, how do you maintain your privacy??
We want to introduce you to MAXA Cookie Manager. Unlike other cookie tools and internet clean
up suites, which can only show you what is in the Browser's own cookie cache, MAXA Cookie
Manager displays cookies of all types, including these insidious browser independent cookies.
We can select a cookie and perform different actions with it. Here's the youtube cookie
we saw before. It's highlighted in yellow as it's new.
It's a flash cookie and it never expires If we take a look at its contents, we can see
that the volume level is saved.
Cookie Manager would consider this cookie to be a "good" cookie as it only provides
a useful tool. We can add it to our white list. This means it will never be deleted.
But remember that a lot of cookies are solely used to track your movements on the web. Cookie
Manager helps you to recognize those cookies, known as web bugs: By default a warning is
shown when webbugs are found. It allows you to delete them immediately or even block them.
We'll look at blocking later. For now, let's keep the web bugs and look at the evaluation
function.
This function will classify the cookies into Webbugs (red), suspect cookies (yellow) and
others (green). In addition it will highlight whitelisted cookies in white.
Depending on their color evaluation, cookies can automatically be deleted.
Let's open the program's settings, go to the tab named automatic deletion and see the options
available. To delete, for example, all web bugs and yellow cookies, we simply choose
Yellow. If we had established a whitelist containing all sites from which we want to
keep cookies, we also could select to delete all cookies except those in the whitelist.
Similarly, there's the possibility to blacklist some websites explicitly.
If we don't want to have any traffic to this cookie at all, we can add it to the blocked
domains, which means no connection to that website will be allowed at all! This is especially
a good way to handle tracking cookies. But if you still want to look at the page that
set the cookie, use only the cookie-block. Cookie Manager provides many more features
that cannot be covered in this video. For more detailed information on all of Cookie
Manager's features, please consult the help file.
Cookie Manager is available as free standard version. For automatic cookie handling capabilities,
the Pro version can be purchased from our website.
Download MAXA Cookie Manager Standard now and have a look at the cookies on your computer!
You will be surprised how many have accumulated. Thank you for watching.