Many web sites want to save "cookies" on your hard drive. These "cookies" are bits of information about what you've been doing at their site, about other web sites you've visited, or almost anything else. The sites can then identify you later by examining cookies that they've previously saved on your hard drive. These cookies can be used to track your web-surfing behavior, often for the purpose of trying to target advertisements more effectively. On a Macintosh, the Netscape cookie file is saved as "Hard Drive:System Folder:Preferences:Netscape ﾄ:MagicCookie".
Many people don't like the idea of web sites using their hard drive to save information, just so that they can be more effectively targeted for advertisements. There are many ways to defeat cookies, including other AppleScripts that delete the cookie file or sometimes just selected entries from the file. But where's the fun in that?
Cookie's Revenge opens your cookie file and replaces the cookie data with subtly bogus information. Superficially it will look like all data is intact, but the information has been scrambled and rendered useless. Sites will think that they're tracking you when in fact they're only tracking random data.
To run Cookie's Revenge, just double-click it. It will move your existing cookie file to the Trash, and substitute a new one. When run, it will warn you of what it's about to do. Click "OK" to continue, "Cancel" to abort the operation, or "Don't Warn Again" to stop warning messages from appearing in the future. Cookie's Revenge may take a couple of minutes to run, especially if you have a lot of cookies.
Currently Cookie's Revenge works only with Netscape Navigator. It should work with any version of Navigator. An Internet Explorer version may be forthcoming, if I ever get around to installing the program.
This AppleScript is free. It can be found at <ftp://ftp.rmi.net//pub2/tph/cookie/cookies-revenge.sit.hqx>.
