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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.
 
GET_BROWSER(3)								 1							    GET_BROWSER(3)

get_browser - Tells what the user's browser is capable of

SYNOPSIS
mixed get_browser ([string $user_agent], [bool $return_array = false]) DESCRIPTION
Attempts to determine the capabilities of the user's browser, by looking up the browser's information in the browscap.ini file. PARAMETERS
o $user_agent - The User Agent to be analyzed. By default, the value of HTTP User-Agent header is used; however, you can alter this (i.e., look up another browser's info) by passing this parameter. You can bypass this parameter with a NULL value. o $return_array - If set to TRUE, this function will return an array instead of an object. RETURN VALUES
The information is returned in an object or an array which will contain various data elements representing, for instance, the browser's major and minor version numbers and ID string; TRUE/ FALSE values for features such as frames, JavaScript, and cookies; and so forth. The cookies value simply means that the browser itself is capable of accepting cookies and does not mean the user has enabled the browser to accept cookies or not. The only way to test if cookies are accepted is to set one with setcookie(3), reload, and check for the value. CHANGELOG
+--------+--------------------------------------------------+ |Version | | | | | | | Description | | | | +--------+--------------------------------------------------+ | 4.3.2 | | | | | | | The optional parameter $return_array was added. | | | | +--------+--------------------------------------------------+ EXAMPLES
Example #1 Listing all information about the users browser <?php echo $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] . " "; $browser = get_browser(null, true); print_r($browser); ?> The above example will output something similar to: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3 Array ( [browser_name_regex] => ^mozilla/5.0 (windows; .; windows nt 5.1; .*rv:.*) gecko/.* firefox/0.9.*$ [browser_name_pattern] => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; ?; Windows NT 5.1; *rv:*) Gecko/* Firefox/0.9* [parent] => Firefox 0.9 [platform] => WinXP [browser] => Firefox [version] => 0.9 [majorver] => 0 [minorver] => 9 [cssversion] => 2 [frames] => 1 [iframes] => 1 [tables] => 1 [cookies] => 1 [backgroundsounds] => [vbscript] => [javascript] => 1 [javaapplets] => 1 [activexcontrols] => [cdf] => [aol] => [beta] => 1 [win16] => [crawler] => [stripper] => [wap] => [netclr] => ) NOTES
Note In order for this to work, your browscap configuration setting in php.ini must point to the correct location of the browscap.ini file on your system. browscap.ini is not bundled with PHP, but you may find an up-to-date php_browscap.ini file here. While browscap.ini contains information on many browsers, it relies on user updates to keep the database current. The format of the file is fairly self-explanatory. PHP Documentation Group GET_BROWSER(3)
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