Firefox's unstoppable zombie Google cookie
Earlier in the week there was a topic about DNT. The comments for which strayed onto tracking cookies. This got me looking at my own cookie policies.
I've been using the Self-Destructing Cookies addon for some time now. It does a decent job of blocking 3rd party cookies and managing the few first party cookies which I want to allow. I guess relying on an addon has made me complacent, I've just assumed that through all the version upgrades everything was still working the way I'd originally set it up.
Skip forward to this week when I reviewed my cookie policies. I went into Firefox's preferences and clicked the 'remove individual cookies' option on the 'Privacy' tab so I could see exactly what was there. To my surprise there was a Google PREF cookie. The addon I use shouldn't be allowing any cookies from Google, but I thought to myself "maybe it's a bug" and deleted it manually.
I closed the 'remove individual cookies' window and the reopened it only to find the Google cookie had reappeared. I didn't have a Google page open so where did it come from?
I've tried:
- Disabling all addons (incase one of them was doing it by stealth).
- Removing Google from the search box.
- Turning off the 'Block reported attack sites / web forgeries' option on the security tab to stop Firefox downloading a list via Google's safebrowsing API.
- Going to google.com/ncr (usually I get redirected to .co.uk,) clicking the padlock in the adressbar and using this menu to manually blacklist all Google.com cookies.
Nothing works. As soon as I delete the Google PREF cookie it comes back. The conclusion I'm coming to is that Firefox is hard coded to plant a Google PREF cookie. I'm now concerned that Firefox is not capable of protecting my privacy in the face of relentless online advertisers.
Sidenote:
I'm not one for conspiracies but whilst trying to look for details on this issue (and finding very few,) I found this document at the Washing Post. It seems to suggest that the NSA and GCHQ are using Google PREF cookies to track people online.