Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Applescript to delete all cookies

Cleaning out your browser cookies can be a pain to keep up with and cleaning out your flash cookies is an even bigger pain. My resolution to this is a simple script that deletes all browser and flash cookies and then empties the trash. I personally have THIS SCRIPT run at login so I don't have to be bothered with it.

For those of you who don't know flash cookies are not like regular cookies in that they are not controlled through your browser settings and they are capable of storing much more of your personal information. So when you go in to "remove cookies" you're not getting rid of these guys. Even more so some of these use the data storage to reinstate the traditional browser cookies that you've already deleted. So even if you get rid of a tracking cookie that cookie's ID will be assigned back to a new cookies again using the flash data as the backup.

So now that I've briefly described some of what Flash cookies are capable of and how you can't get rid of them in the traditional way you can with cookies you're probably wondering how. For those of you who want to manually delete them here are the path locations:

As you can see they are stored in two locations. I have included instructions on how to automate this script to run whenever you login as to avoid having to remember to clear your cookies. I still would highly recommend doing so again before and after all online banking. 

Please note this method of removing flash cookies only applies to Macintosh computers and is not at all similar to how they have to be removed on Windows.  

 Requirements:
Macintosh OSX 10.3.x or newer


As always all questions and comments are welcome and appreciated. Thank you and god bless.

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