When it comes to protecting your privacy online, nothing is more important than a good browser data clearing tool. Deleting your cookies through a web browser’s interface hasn’t been good enough for a long time.
Fortunately, utilities like CCleaner and Glary Utilities as well as Firefox add-ons and Chrome extensions fill the need to completely clear your private data from browser cache, flash cookies, and so on.
What we need now is a way to manually and selectively protect certain cookies from cleaning.
A lot of banks and financial institutions are requiring users to take an extra step when accessing their account information from a new computer that has never accessed the site before. For example, Chase Bank, which handles the Amazon Rewards Visa Card, requires users to get an authentication code via text message or email to one of the numbers or addresses on record with the account in order to log in from a new computer.
Bank Login Register Computer First
Online banking customers at ING have to answer one or more of their extra security questions in order to access their high-interest online savings account or online checking account.
This extra layer of security helps prevent hackers from gaining access to your account even if they have your username and password. That makes this extra security precaution a welcome addition for most users.
However, neither banking customers nor credit card companies are interested in making it harder to manage your finances online. After successfully completing the extra security checks, users can "register" the computer that they are using so that they do not have to go through the additional security levels the next time they access the website. This registration occurs by the website placing a cookie on the computer that is used to validate the machine during future login attempts.
Unfortunately, these cookies, like all others, are wiped clean by the best privacy tools resulting in the user having to go through the whole process again.
There are ways around the issue. Everything from creating a separate profile or using a different browser to access financial data can work, but they represent an unnecessary extra step when all you want to do is check your checking balance to ensure that you don’t end up with any high overdraft protection fees from your debit card.
A better solution would be for developers to incorporate a vault or protect option in their products whereby a user could manually protect specific cookies through the program interface. To protect abuse, cookies should not be allowed to be added programmatically, or via API, or clicking on a web-based button or JavaScript.
The first solid privacy utility available with a cookie protection feature will be my new top choice for protecting private data online.
The Click&Clean addon for Firefox and Chrome, to clear your private data(flash LSO, cookies, history… etc) automatically when Firefox or Chrome closes.
Yes. It will also hammer all of your bank website cookies too and you’ll be stuck re-registering your computer by answering extra questions or having another text message sent.
What we need is Click & Clean addon with the ability to manually put certain cookies in a vault or other protected area so that they are not wiped out every time when clean our private data.
BTW, great suggestion. I use Click&Clean on Chrome. Haven’t tried it out on Firefox, yet. Probably because I’ve tweaked tons of sites in CS Lite already…