If you really don’t want cookies, In Chrome just select “New Incognito Window” then close the window when you are done here. For Firefox users, it’s “New Private Window”.
The cookies we store here are simply used to allow you to use the site effectively. We do not set third party cookies, which are often for advertising or tracking, set by a site other than the one you are visiting. So if you see third party cookies here you may have a malware problem with your computer. The cookies we set should be safe if you have control over your computer and you are not worried about someone tracking you via physical access to your machine. If you remember to sign out, or don’t select ‘stay signed in’ and then close your browser, they provide provide an attacker less information about you than your browser history.
For anyone interested in their privacy, cookies in themselves are not bad things but they are often used by advertising and tracking companies in a bad way (though they tend to use much harder to delete methods). If you want to stop nefarious tracking, a private browsing/incognito window or “Never remember history” in Firefox is probably the best easy method as it will defeat things like tracking via etag that rely on your cache. Couple with this an extension like better privacy for firefox and/or noscript and you can remove LSO cookies stored by flash (some uses of flash you won’t notice unless you block them). If you want to know whether you are effectively blocking tracking, try going to evercookie . If you can rediscover the cookie on that page after deleting it you are still allowing an attack vector for people tracking you.
An even better route for the very security conscious is to boot from a live CD as when you shut down your computer, everything is gone (apart from anything that can be recovered from RAM). A good option for the security conscious is tails .
All this only controls what is on your machine physically, it doesn’t prevent your ISP tracking you (you’ll need Tor or a trustworthy VPN for that) or the FBI tracking you (you’ll need a browser without exploitable bugs for that) or the cloud services you use providing an effective route into your life for anyone wanting information.
