July 2025

I posted a Life Pro Tip on Reddit:

Delete your web browser’s cookies once or twice a year.

It wipes out tracking data, so advertisers lose the profile they’ve built on you.

It also logs you out of all your web site accounts. When you log back in to them, you’ll find out right away if you don’t know your current password for a site, and then you can reset it. Better now than in an emergency!

(If you use a password manager like 1Password, logging in again is easy.)

The audience I had in mind were the kind of people who keep a PC for ten years and never delete cookies, and who write down their passwords in a notebook that they lost so having to log in to all their accounts again would be a traumatic experience.

It immediately spawned a lot of discussion. Paraphrased: “Lol, great advice for 2012, boomer. It’s useless to do this only once or twice a year. It’s useless to do it at all, because sites have moved on to using browser fingerprints. Use a plugin to autodelete your cookies after each session! Whitelist a few sites whose cookies you want to keep around for longer. Use an ad blocker! Use a VPN! Use Privacy Badger from EFF! Turn up your Firefox settings! Stop using Chrome! Use Pi-hole! Or if you don’t want to be tracked at all, stop using the Internet.”

Gatekeepers. Privacy maximalists who think if you don’t live like a cybersecurity lab tech, you don’t deserve to be online. Trolls and edgelords who just want to look cool. Ah, Reddit, you never disappoint.

My post was up for about half a day, it got almost five thousand upvotes, and then the moderators removed it.

I’m okay with that. It started some interesting discussions, it educated some people, and I learned a few things.