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Disabling 3rd Party Cookies in Firefox 3
Tags: A website cookie is a unique ID that is generated for each visitor to the website. This is an easy way for a site to track your purchases, pages visited within the site, ads you may have clicked on, or account information. Typically, this is an understood and accepted practice. These cookies are considered 1st party cookies because they originate from the website you are visiting. All browsers are configured to accept these types of cookies by default, if only because of many sites require cookies from a functionality perspective.
3rd party cookies, as you may have surmised at this point, do not originate from the website you are browsing. Rather, they are typically served from large ad networks – like DoubleClick – that are visible by multiple sites. The cookies allow the ad network to track your movement across all sites that are members of their ad network. Sounds like a shocking invasion of privacy no? Worse, most of the major browsers also ship with 3rd party cookies enabled or allowed!
Thankfully, Firefox 3 provides an easy method through it’s interface to change this behavior.
- From the Firefox browser window toolbar, navigate to Tools->Options
- Select the Privacy tab.
- In the Cookies section you will see a checkbox next to Accept third-party cookies. Simply Uncheck that option to deny 3rd party cookies.
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[...] disabling 3rd party cookies in your browser, you can go a long way in maintaining your Internet browsing privacy. Often, this is enough to [...]