My informal motto for 2025 is “make technology work for me, not against me” which sometimes means we have to use malicious compliance to make technology work against itself.
In today’s addition- disable cookies in your mobile browser. Why do I want to do this? Because I want to be aware of and consenting to the information about my internet use that gets monitored or tracked online. This isn’t out of paranoia, it’s mostly an indignant sense of right and wrong. Plus, I’m tired of clicking on deceptive cookie menus and having to scroll down to disable them every single time. I just want to be able to google something without every app I use sending me ads for it for the next week.
Not every browser will allow you to do this; if you use google chrome on your mobile device, sorry, this won’t work. There is no way to disable cookies in the chrome mobile browser, though you can on desktop.
This is the process for Safari (which is specific to iOS devices). If you use another browser like Mozilla, you’ll have to look up how to do this, but chances are it’s similar to this process. If you use DuckDuckGo, you don’t have to do this, because DuckDuckGo blocks third party cookies automatically! You lucky duck…I’ll show myself out.
As noted at the end of this video, there are quite a few websites that do not work when cookies are blocked, so I use Chrome as my “backup” option and paste links into chrome that won’t work in Safari.
