How to Block ETag Cookies in Chrome

Latest

Most people don’t even know it exists but the new ETag technology is a serious privacy invasion that places undeletable cookies on your computer. The analytics provider KISSmetrics was the first to use it, many major websites like Hulu and Spotify distributed these cookies to millions of their users.

Due to a lawsuit these practices were temporarily stopped – but complete security can only be achieved by blocking the scripts that can distribute ETag cookies.

The goal of the new (and potentially illegal) ETag technology is to be able to track users even if they delete their cookies. The trick is that the ETag stores information in the user’s cache that re-creates a tracking cookie every session. This way, KISSmetrics can track users against their will even if they choose not to be tracked by deleting their cookies.

A better solution than clearing the browser cache is preventing the scripts from being loaded in the browser. This can be done by adjusting host files, a much simpler solution is adding a privacy filter to Adblock Plus for Google Chrome. Adblock Plus is best known for blocking banners and other advertisements from websites. But it can also be configured to do much more than that – any unwanted element can be blocked from the internet, including tracking and other malicious codes. The elements that are to be blocked are with Adblock Plus are defined by filter rules a user can activate by subscribing to free filter lists that are created and maintained by members of the Adblock Plus community.

Just follow these simple steps in order to disable tracking and protect your privacy:

1) Visit the Chrome Web Store and install Adblock Plus for Chrome:

2) Right-click on the ABP logo and choose Options:

3) Activate the EasyPrivacy filter list:

Paste the URL “https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.txt” into the field on the bottom of the “Filter lists” tab and click the “Add URL” button.

That’s it. By subscribing to the EasyPrivacy filter list, all tracking codes including ETags will be blocked from being loaded in your Google Chrome browser in order to protect your privacy.

This is a guest post written by Tom, co-editor of chrome-plugins.org, a website featuring reviews of the best extensions, apps and themes for Google Chrome. Visit Chrome Plugins now!

Some of the more popular alternatives to point of sale checkout

Decades ago we were all used to queueing at the traditional point of sales (POS). The high street cash register was king when it came to paying for purchases, in…

Are You Insured Against Cyber-Attacks?

With a number of high-profile data breaches in the past year, businesses should be making sure their networks are adequately protected. Last year, Sony experienced one of the largest data…

Are TechCrunch Hypocrites? The Groupon Series

TechCrunch have commissioned and been running posts (So Far a 4 part series) about how Groupon is the devil and certain of collapse… In the most recent article published 2…

Effects of Violent Video Games Proved By Research Study

Effects of Violent Video Games A research study on the effects of violent video games has shown an increase of aggression. This is caused by playing a violent video game,…

Create from Scratch a Away3D Shoot’em’Up Game: Part 4

Now that we have the player and some enemies we need for them to be able to interact. This is done through collision detection which you will learn in this fourth part.

Getting Started With BetweenAS3

There are many popular open source tweening engines in the Flash community today. Numbered among these are Tweener, TweenLite/Tweenmax, Tweensy, and GTween. This is a short look at the capabilities of newcomer to the scene: BetweenAS3. BetweenAS3 is the tweening engine brainchild of Yoshihiro (yossy) Shindo and is available as part of the Spark project (i.e. it is brought to us by one of the same group that brought the world the FLARToolkit for Augmented Reality in Flash and countless other goodies).

Web Roundups: 7 Free Flash CMS

A Flash CMS is a good option to deliver projects to your clients when they want to manage and change the content easly, without programming knowledge and avoiding to edit the flash files. Today, we show you the free available options which you should bear in mind before decide to go on Premium Products.

Create from Scratch a Away3D Shoot’em’Up Game: Part 3

After you have created the 3D level, in the part 3 of this Away3D series, we will show you how to add the player spacecraft and enemies.

Create an intelligent XML image Gallery & Slideshow in Flash CS4 (+PHP) – Part I/II

In this article you will learn how to build an image gallery that will load images from a web server. I decide to call it “Intelligent” because you don’t need to configure any XML or flash file. Just put the Flash movie and the images on a server and they will be loaded automatically. Nice ah?

Create from Scratch a Away3D Shoot’em’Up Game: Part 2

In the part 1 of these tutorial series articles we created a framework that we could build off to start making the actual game. Now it’s time to create a 3D level for the player to fly through.

Create from Scratch a Away3D Shoot’em’Up Game: Part 1

Today we start a 9 part tutorial series on creating a Shoot’em’Up game. We will cover all the necessary topics to create it from scratch, which will help you to understand and apply these guidelines to other projects. Ath this first part. we look at getting the Away3D engine up and running by creating a UIComponent that will contain and initialize the necessary Away3D components.

Build a Creative “Swirl Animated Menu” with Flash CS4

Flash it’s a powerful application and can be really complex, but even beginners can create a cool menu for demonstration or for use in a personal site. The menu that we will create is simple, but the swirl animation is something that you don’t see everywhere, for that I’ve decided to explain one way to make an animation of growing swirls without any Action Script code.You will also learn how to import artwork from illustrator where I’ve pre-made the graphics, the work is very simple and the result will be very cool.

SWFObject and Best Practice Implementation

With more and more full screen Flash web sites appearing on the internet, it’s important to understand how to properly embed the Flash movie in the browser window.

In this tutorial we will cover best practice embedding of SWF movies using SWFObject with a custom function for adding browser scrollbars for smaller browser windows.

Flash Builder 4 – Deep Look Into Improvements!

Adobe released early June 2009 the Flash Builder 4 and we took the chance to look deep into this awesome program.

The news are many…. starting in IDE improvements to native Action Script handling, many other things were added. In this article we will show you some examples distributed in topics about some of these new features.

Create a 3D Bowling Game with JiglibFlash and Papervision 3D

Possibly the hottest thing to hit the Flash community since the advent of several excellent 3D engines is the recent debut of 3D physics engines. Here we’ll examine a way of using one of the more popular 3D engines, JiglibFlash, in conjunction with the prominent 3D engine Papervision3D to create a bowling game.

Create a Dynamic Event Calendar in Flex Builder 3 with Actionscript 3.0

This tutorial will allow readers to create an Event Calendar application using Flex. The final user will be able to plan over a daily, weekly or monthly plan.

You will learn on this step by step Flex tutorial, to create from scratch those Graphic User Interfaces, integrate them, and create a complete Rich Internet Application with a professional look.

Build a Dynamic Accordion Menu in Flash CS4 with ActionScript 3.0 and XML

In this tutorial you will learn how to build an accordion style menu from scratch that can be configured by using an external file.

The menu items can bet totally configured in XML with label and can load text, image or swf on it’s open “state”. Just follow the tutorial, it’s quite simple. At the end you will see a secon example achieved by this procedure.

Build a contact manager in Flex 3 with ZendAMF; Part Two – Coding the CRUD & Final Release

The complete result of this 2 part tutorial is a contact manager built in flex that uses ZendAMF to store data in mysql. In the this second part we will code all the application and backend functions using Flex 3 + ZendAMF + Php 5 + MySql. This part will use a general crud system (Create, Read, Update and Delete) that is similar to the most applications needs. You will be able to write you own application from scratch.

Related posts

Leave a Reply Cancel Reply