Google doesn’t like my zeroed out cookie
A ways back. I wrote a little HowTo on zeroing out and then protecting the perpetual cookie that Google likes to give you. The idea behind using the same cookie as myself, iMilly, and a bunch of other people is that by sharing a cookie, Google would find it that much harder to aggregate all your search data into a nosy little profile. Well you can forget about all that. About the time Google broke the news of a slowdown in the click rate of their ads, they started sending us with the zero cookie people over to this 403 error page.
I don’t know if the two are related, but I have said in the past that if Google ever tries to target ads based on their consumers who are savvy enough to do a little mischief with their cookie, well, I can be pretty sure that those users would block those ads too.
I’d like to propose a workaround. Since Google has decided to block our agreed upon zero cookie, I say we all just agree to use another one. Feel free to use this one (fetched via the always awesome cURL):
Added cookie PREF="ID=bce8f3f9e5dce73e:TM=1206810267:LM=1206810267:S=F9QPv3nrV4NpDJsu" for domain google.com, path /, expire 1269882267
Quickie step by step for Firefox:
- Download and install Firefox extensions Add N Edit Cookies and CookieCuller.
- Visit Google to get the cookie.
- Use Add N Edit Cookies to change your cookie to the ID shown above.
- Follow the rest of my HowTo on using CookieCuller and the Firefox preferences to protect your altered Google cookie, and any other cookie you deem worthy of keeping around. Remaining cookies will be upchucked when you close Firefox.
