They asked you if you'd like to store preferences in cookies, not whether you'd like them to set cookies in general. So if I were writing support for this feature, I'd set a separate cookie (e.g., nopref
) and check whether user has this cookie. There is a good chance you'll find such a cookie for that site, which you can clear without clearing other cookies or history.
Inspecting cookies set for a particular page
In Firefox, you can list cookies for a particular page by right-clicking a blank part of the page, then selecting View page info option. You'll find a "View Cookies" button in the "Security" tab. In Chrome, you have the same "View page info" option, which opens a dialog that hangs from the address bar. Link near the top will take you to a listing of cookies. I assume similar features can be found in other browsers.
Discovering if site sets a cookie
Here's one way you can discover what the site is doing. Open the site in Incognito mode. Open developer tools and switch to Network tab. Then check out what activity is happening in the background as you decline to have the site track you with cookies. Specifically, look for response headers and see if there are any 'Set-Cookie' headers in there. Then try deleting cookies mentioned in the header and see if that makes any difference.
About localStorage
Since another poster has mentioned localStorage (in-browser database), I'll comment on that as well. I think it'll be very rare that the site uses localStorage for this purpose as localStorage data isn't accessible to the server unless there is JavaScript code that sends the data back to server. If you wish to check the contents of the localStorage, the fastest way is to open the developer tools in your browser, go to (JavaScript) Console tab, and type localStorage
. This should give you an output that looks something like:
Storage { someKey: "value", length: 1 }
The someKey
identifies the value set by JavaScript on the page you are on. If you believe someKey
does something relevant, you can try removing it by running the following:
localstorage.removeItem('someKey');
This removes the data under someKey
key from the localStorage, and reloading the page may restore it to 'factory settings'. If you're not sure if the particular key is set by the cookie notification functionality, you may open the page in incognito mode, and list the contents of localStorage before and after interacting with the page.
Again, I doubt too many sites use localStorage for this purpose.