On Thursday, May 1 we looked at how to clear both cookies and “cached” items from Internet browsers in mobile phones and PCs. We referred to this Reader’s Digest article: How to Clear Cookies on iPhone and Android—and Why You Should https://www.rd.com/article/how-to-clear-cookies-from-phone/
The article and its instructions speak for themselves! The article defines what a “cookie” is and how it differs from a “cache”. The latter can grow very large and consume a lot of storage space.
Following the instructions, Chris cleared the cookies and cache from Chrome in her phone, and Chrome on her laptop.
Since we reside in the EU, our privacy is protected by the GDPR ( The General Data Protection Regulation) and we have the right to deny downloading third party (often advertising and data analysis) cookies. We examined the types of cookie embedded in a typical newspaper website…and there are loads, many of which are linked to companies we had never heard of.
Some cookies are necessary for the website to work properly and cannot be deleted. After much discussion, we established that if you have a paid subscription to a newspaper and access its content through an app on a mobile phone (rather than looking at it in a browser window) , then you have the option to deny downloading cookies in the app. This is done on an app by app basis. However some of them are still marked “Essential” and cannot be turned off. (Here’s an example from Chris’s paid subscription app)
We discussed where people get their news from: TV news channels and on-line newspapers. Some members have paid subscriptions. To get a balanced view of world news it’s best to view or read international news media from different countries. Some channels’ live news feeds are available on YouTube, others via their website. Social media are not a good source of reliable information!
Sometimes you’d like to read an article from a newspaper which is behind a paywall. Chris demonstrated Removepaywall.com https://www.removepaywall.com which works by allowing users to search various internet archives. These archived pages do not require a login and prevent users from being tracked. Simply copy the URL (link) of the article and paste it into the search box. In this context we took a look at The Internet Archive https://archive.org which is a non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more. We found this 1963 sketch starring Freddy Frinton and May Warden which is popular in several European countries at New Year: “Dinner for One” https://archive.org/details/DinnerForOne_559
Finally, Terry shared this amusing YouTube sketch, which demonstrates another way of clearing cookies: