As you all know by now, I really hate being spied on by web sites and other on-line entities. I’m pretty sure this misbehavior won’t be legal much longer but I’m equally sure that the on-line advertising industry won’t go gentle into that good night and will find ways to nibble around the edges of whatever laws get passed.
Happily, there’s Magic Lasso which pretty much solves the problem for Safari users. That would be the end of the story except that I use XWidgets with mu4e to read HTML emails and Elfeed entries through the wonderful elfeed-webkit. They work nicely but now Magic Lasso is no longer filtering their content so cookies and trackers are being accumulated. For the longest time I couldn’t find where they were being stored. I finally stumbled on its location and discovered that it was a simple text file that could simply be deleted.
The problem was that I had to remember to do it and more specifically, where the file was located. I finally stopped being stupid and wrote a simple function to delete the file:
(defun jcs-kill-cookies ()
"Delete the cookies from Webkit"
(interactive)
(delete-file ".emacs.d/url/cookies")
(message "Cookies deleted."))
It’s almost too simple to bother showing.
While I was at it, I also called jcs-kill-cookies when I quit elfeed so I don’t have to remember to do it manually. All of this is trivial, of course, but it’s another example of sanding down your workflow to make it as simple as possible. Now things pretty much take care of themselves. I suppose I should figure out a way to delete cookies after email too but for now I’m happy that the problem is mostly solved.