Individual Risk Management (Personal IT Security) and Browser Cache Management Post: 303033322

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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

04-03-2019

Administrator

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.

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curlopt_cookiesession

CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION(3)				     curl_easy_setopt options					  CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION(3)

NAME

       CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION - start a new cookie session

SYNOPSIS

       #include <curl/curl.h>

       CURLcode curl_easy_setopt(CURL *handle, CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, long init);

DESCRIPTION

       Pass a long set to 1 to mark this as a new cookie "session". It will force libcurl to ignore all cookies it is about to load that are "ses-
       sion cookies" from the previous session. By default, libcurl always stores and loads all cookies, independent if they are  session  cookies
       or not. Session cookies are cookies without expiry date and they are meant to be alive and existing for this "session" only.

       A "session" is usually defined in browser land for as long as you have your browser up, more or less.

DEFAULT

       0

PROTOCOLS

       HTTP

EXAMPLE

       TODO

AVAILABILITY

       Along with HTTP

RETURN VALUE

       Returns CURLE_OK

SEE ALSO

       CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE(3), CURLOPT_COOKIE(3),

libcurl 7.54.0							 February 03, 2016					  CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION(3)