So, I went from about 80 to 50 apps on my phone which feels pretty great. In the past, the Android web experience would be pretty terrible compared to the app. This is not the case anymore, so I made a bunch of browser links and deleted lots of apps.
I usually don’t save any browser cookies, but now the only minor complaint I have on my setup is that I have to login on all these websites that replace the apps. If I save cookies for those sites to remember my login info, what kind of information would be stored aside of the credentials?
Essentially, the question would be, what is the extent of the information that can be stored in cookies? Can I decide that only login information are saved with nothing else but that?
It’s pretty time consuming but you could read what you are agreeing to when you click to accept the cookies. If that is too daunting, or you realize that you really don’t want the persistent cookies on your device, how about using a password manager which autofills your credentials each time you wish to login?
I’m already clearing on exit all cookies by default. I also already use a password manager,but I’d prefer to have some sites already logged-in, if there’s a way to do it in a “clean” private way.
with brave you could use the “forget me when I close this site” as a standard and disable it for sites where you want to stay logged in
edit: reread the thread, and if you want to know what exactly is stored with the cookies I’m not sure there’s a way other than reading what the site provider states is stored
If this is for Brave (or anything chromium), I don’t know of any option to view cookies individually.
Maybe there is a way to access their data in a legible way including browsing with a desktop, but I have never found chromium browser data to be that straightforward to go through even on desktop. On Firefox I have done this and there are extensions that lay them out graphically to do what you are describing. However I have not attempted this on mobile, and Firefox on mobile (assuming there is an extension for Android that lays out cookies nicely) is still troublesome.
Unless there is a killer option to conveniently go through cookies (I’d love to know!) I think your best option would be to autofill from a login manager if you are concerned. Even if you had the desktop Firefox convenience of touching cookies individually, it is another problem to identify which ones you want to keep and to keep it that way without checking every single time.
For the most part, the cookies you would save alongside login are supplements to identifying you as you are on that website, which is already clear since you are logged in. If other sites cannot access that (they shouldn’t by default I believe) then I would the possible threat should be very low. There are better javascript (and other) tactics to identify more on demand than looking at cookies. Unless you have an explicit concern it might not be worth your time to worry about this.
Thanks all, following this thread, I understand that you can’t cherry pick which information can be stored on a cookie. It’s either you accept all the cookies of a website or none of them.
So either I have a dedicated browser for those logins as sha123 suggested or I just log-in with my password manager.
I also turned this on, but for whatever reason, I can’t figure out why neither Brave nor Firefox deletes all browser data after closing the apps. Sometimes when I turn on Firefox again, I see some previously opened links in the search history when I’m trying to search for something.
Is this applied consistently? How do I do that? It sounds a bit like profiles on Safari. Does Brave do a good job of preventing cross-site/app tracking? I’m just afraid that using your advice, Meta and Google will try to spy on those cookies.
“Forget me when I close this site” is a Brave Shields feature that can be turned on by default in the Brave Settings > Brave Shields & privacy > Forget me when I close this site.
I use Brave with that setting enabled on a daily basis for casual browsing and under Settings > Site settings > Data stored there are only entrances for sites where I disabled it, so I guess you could say it works consistently.
On Firefox, whenever you’re done using the browser, click on the three dots at the top right, and the click on quit. That’s how it will perform its cleanup tasks.