What happens if you never delete cookies on Android

Day after day, our mobile stores a lot of new data. Every time we browse new sites on the Internet, every time we use certain applications or even when we listen to streaming music, our Android generates new data. These accumulate in storage and, although we have more and more GB, it is a good idea to perform maintenance from time to time.

Therefore, below We will explain to you why it makes sense to delete cookies from time to time, maintenance which is not often carried out because we concentrate on a cache which has a less good reputation in terms of storage consumption. And we’ll also see what happens if you never delete cookies on your Android.

Don’t confuse cookies and cache

First of all, a clarification must be made. You may already know this, but just in case: cache and cookies are not the same, although they are similar in a certain sense. As they say, every time you browse, new files are created on your mobile. Some are used to identify you -cookies-, while others are used by the applications themselves to save time during your next access -to the cache-.

Taking a web page as an example, if you enter, you generate cookies that will be used to identify you the next time you log inbut data such as images, video previews and other content will also be cached and will not need to be loaded the next time you access them.

This makes the next load faster, but imagine that you never visit this page again in your life: you have a few megabytes occupied in your storage that will no longer be of any use to you. A good idea is to clear the cache from time to time and, if you do that and come back to this website, the only thing is that it will take a few seconds longer to load, but a little longer.

What happens if you don’t delete cookies from your Android mobile

We will focus on cookies. The truth is that these elements do not take up too much space on our phone. Unlike cache, which can consume even a few GB per busy application, cookie consumption is very low. However, it is advisable to carry out maintenance for safety reasons.

And that’s it, We are increasingly committed to our online security and there are sites that collect way more than they need to operate. If you frequently visit a website or certain applications, you may not care about the presence of their cookies, but throughout the year we visit hundreds of websites and try many applications that we do not ‘Let’s never open again.

If you don’t delete cookies and a site is attacked with your information on it, can be used against you to, for example, track you. The downside is that you lose the session and the first time you browse the site the experience may be a little slower, but you have to choose between greater privacy or complete comfort.

Therefore, from time to time it is convenient to do a cleanup because no matter how many cookies you have (unless it is a crazy amount), the storage they take up is minimal and the mobile will be able to handle it perfectly, but the security problem is there.

That said, let’s start by telling you how to clean cookies stored in the browser.

Clear browser cookies

Next I’m going to talk about Edge, Chrome, Brave and Opera, but if you use another one, be aware that the path names or locations will be very similar.

To delete cookies in Chromewhat you need to do is the following:

• The first thing is to click on the three vertical dots at the top right and select “Settings”.
• We look for the “Basic settings” section and, inside, click on “Privacy and security”.
• We enter the “Delete browsing data” section and, there we have several tabs that we can select. One of them is “Cookies and Site Data”, but you can also clear the cache along the way.

To do the same in Edgethe steps are as follows:

• At the bottom right of the main Edge page, we have three horizontal bars. By clicking, a tab is displayed in which we find ‘Parameters’.
• In “Settings”, click on “Privacy and security” and go to “Delete browsing data”.
• There we have the option to delete cache and cookies. Click “Delete Data” and that’s it.

A courageousyou must do the following:

• At the bottom right we have the three vertical dots. We click and go to “Settings”.
• We click on the first option, “Brave protections and privacy” and scroll until we find the “Clear browsing data” tab.
• There we can choose what we want to delete, cookies and cache among the options. In the “Advanced Settings” options of the same section we have some additional options.

And to delete Opera cookiesYou have to do this:

• At the bottom right we have our avatar. When you click on it, a menu is displayed and you have to click on the configuration symbol at the top right.
• We navigate to “Privacy and Security”, we go to “Delete data…” and we can select what we want to delete.

Delete cookies from Android settings

There is another way to do this, although it is something more beastly, and it comes from the Android configuration. With this method, we delete both data that is not considered important like cookies and cache at once or all data from the application in one go (but without uninstalling it).

Let’s take an example from Google Chrome.

• To access it, we go to the Android settings and select the “Applications” tab.
• There, we click on one of them, Chrome in my case, and we go to “Storage and cache”.
• There we have some data about what the application occupies, but we have to go to “Delete storage”.
• Inside we have three options: free up space for unimportant data, free up space in cache and cookies, or delete all data.
• We click on “Manage” to delete cookies and cache and there are two other options: either delete all data or do it only from the sites we want. For example, Aliexpress consumes 430 MB and since I don’t use it much, I click on it and click “Delete data and reset permissions”.

How to block cookies

Now though, You may not only want to delete cookies, but also not create new ones without your control. every time you access a site. All four browsers that we have mentioned allow the “Block cookies” option and the operation is practically identical in each of them.

The tab is called “Third Party Cookies” and offers four options:

• Allow all third-party cookies.
• Block third-party cookies in private browsing mode.
• Block third-party cookies, whether you are incognito or not.
• Block third-party cookies, but whitelist sites that might generate this information.

You may think there are several steps, but the truth is that Thanks to cookies, websites and apps know a lot about you and, if there are any that you don’t want to give access to, it’s worth spending a few minutes setting it up.

Cover image | Alexandre Alcolea

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