Question

I have these questions to ask:

• Should I clear my browser cookies and temp files daily?

• It is good or bad to clear cookies and temp files daily? If so why?

Answer 1

What do you want to achieve?

If you want privacy, I suggest you use your favorite browser's privacy/incognito mode.

The biggest disadvantages of losing your cookies, I can think of right now, is that you will have to login again on many websites.
The disadvantage of losing your temp files is that page load time will increase a bit on the next visit because no data is cached.

Answer 2

Interesting read here from lifehacker - fact and fiction the truth about browser cookies by the How-to Geek

Answer 3

Unless you are completely paranoid about people "harvesting ur dataz", cookies should not be a concern. Yes, some cookies are used for user tracking or displaying advertisements, but unless you provide your browser with specific personal information, it won't have access to these things (barring certain specific security exploits which are generally patched quickly - providing you install updates regularly)

Tempfiles use a small amount of disk space, and the amount of Internet traffic that is saved by browser caches (worldwide) is non-trivial. Clearing your browser cache should be unnecessary unless a website is having problems displaying on your machine.

Answer 4

Don't forget about Adobe Flash Player "Local Shared Objects" (LSOs), those insidious copy-cat cookies that Flash Player saves on its own and which neither Internet Explorer nor Firefox will clean up for you. Check out the following folder on your system, after supposedly clearing your temporary files. You'll be surprised:

%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys

In the subfolders therein, you'll find a record of many of the sites you visited that use Flash Player.

Also, so called "Private Browsing" or "InPrivate" features won't save you either, if Flash Player is involved in any of the pages you're visiting and your Flash Player isn't 10.1 or later. (Flash Player apparently participates in Private Browsing now, but previous versions didn't.)

So, if you go to the lengths of cleaning up your cookies and temporary files but not clearing your Flash Player LSOs, there's a strong chance your friendly neighborhood online advertisement network is simply going to restore your browser cookies to their original values using the backup they stored in your Flash Player's LSOs. So your deletion of tracking cookies is for naught.

In other words, if you're not going to do a thorough job and clean Flash LSOs as well, there's no point in doing a half-assed job... those advertising companies will still know who you are after your tracking cookies have been restored from LSO backups. Sneaky, yes!

Additional information excerpted from Local Shared Object - Wikipedia, with my emphasis:

LSOs can be used by web sites to collect information on how people navigate those web sites even if people believe they've restricted the data collection. More than half of the internet’s top websites use LSOs to track users and store information about them. There is relatively little public awareness of LSOs, and they can usually not be deleted by the cookie privacy controls in a web browser. This may lead a web user to believe a computer is cleared of tracking objects, when it is not.