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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Individual Risk Management (Personal IT Security) and Browser Cache Management Post 303033322 by Neo on Wednesday 3rd of April 2019 07:56:15 AM
Old 04-03-2019
Quote:
Originally Posted by bakunin

You asked for a scenario where this might pose a risk to the user: let us say i search Google for ways to overcome personal debt repeatedly. If one of the "advertisement partners" of Google is the next bank and if Google is able to identify me across sessions i may well have lowered my credit rating effectively by doing that research - even if it might not even be for me. Given, that is a constructed example and includes a lot of conjecture - but the girl getting advertisement for baby food before even her parents were aware of her pregnancy was real. It is not a lot different (not in scope and definitely not in technical background) from what i presented here.
Yes, that first example is "constructed" and not really realistic.

The second is a real example, but that example is not because of "cookies and caches"... it was because the girl had made purchases with Target and so Target (a retail chain in the US) sent her a paper flyer in the mail based on her purchases.

Quote:
Pole identified 25 products that when purchased together indicate a women is likely pregnant. The value of this information was that Target could send coupons to the pregnant woman at an expensive and habit-forming period of her life.
Neither of your examples are related to clearing cookies and caches.

The first is just a fantasy based without facts or details.

The second is well documented NOT to be related to cookies or web caches, but is related to the computer records of the purchases of the girl in the story. The article ends with an apology:

Quote:
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. "I had a talk with my daughter," he said. "It turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August. I owe you an apology."
Can we please stick to the facts of "cookies" and "caches" which you advised people to clear "for their own good".

Neither of the scenarios you posted are relevant to that. I am sorry to inform!!

On the other hand, even if the girl in the "real story" above cleared her cookies and cache, she would have still got the coupons because she was targeted (marketing) because of her purchase history with the company in their database, not because of "cookies" or "caches" in browsers.
 
VOP_READDIR(9)						   BSD Kernel Developer's Manual					    VOP_READDIR(9)

NAME
VOP_READDIR -- read contents of a directory SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/param.h> #include <sys/dirent.h> #include <sys/vnode.h> int VOP_READDIR(struct vnode *vp, struct uio *uio, struct ucred *cred, int *eofflag, int *ncookies, u_long **cookies); DESCRIPTION
Read directory entries. vp The vnode of the directory. uio Where to read the directory contents. cred The caller's credentials. eofflag Return end of file status (NULL if not wanted). ncookies Number of directory cookies generated for NFS (NULL if not wanted). cookies Directory seek cookies generated for NFS (NULL if not wanted). The directory contents are read into struct dirent structures. If the on-disc data structures differ from this then they should be trans- lated. LOCKS
The directory should be locked on entry and will still be locked on exit. RETURN VALUES
Zero is returned on success, otherwise an error code is returned. If this is called from the NFS server, the extra arguments eofflag, ncookies and cookies are given. The value of *eofflag should be set to TRUE if the end of the directory is reached while reading. The directory seek cookies are returned to the NFS client and may be used later to restart a directory read part way through the directory. There should be one cookie returned per directory entry. The value of the cookie should be the offset within the directory where the on-disc version of the appropriate directory entry starts. Memory for the cookies should be allocated using: ...; *ncookies = number of entries read; *cookies = malloc(*ncookies * sizeof(u_long), M_TEMP, M_WAITOK); ERRORS
[EINVAL] An attempt was made to read from an illegal offset in the directory. [EIO] A read error occurred while reading the directory. SEE ALSO
vnode(9) AUTHORS
This manual page was written by Doug Rabson. BSD
July 24, 1996 BSD
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