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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.
 
CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR(3)					     curl_easy_setopt options					      CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR(3)

NAME
CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR - file name to store cookies to SYNOPSIS
#include <curl/curl.h> CURLcode curl_easy_setopt(CURL *handle, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, char *filename); DESCRIPTION
Pass a filename as char *, zero terminated. This will make libcurl write all internally known cookies to the specified file when curl_easy_cleanup(3) is called. If no cookies are known, no file will be created. Specify "-" as filename to instead have the cookies writ- ten to stdout. Using this option also enables cookies for this session, so if you for example follow a location it will make matching cook- ies get sent accordingly. Note that libcurl doesn't read any cookies from the cookie jar. If you want to read cookies from a file, use CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE(3). If the cookie jar file can't be created or written to (when the curl_easy_cleanup(3) is called), libcurl will not and cannot report an error for this. Using CURLOPT_VERBOSE(3) or CURLOPT_DEBUGFUNCTION(3) will get a warning to display, but that is the only visible feedback you get about this possibly lethal situation. Since 7.43.0 cookies that were imported in the Set-Cookie format without a domain name are not exported by this option. The application does not have to keep the string around after setting this option. DEFAULT
NULL PROTOCOLS
HTTP EXAMPLE
TODO AVAILABILITY
Along with HTTP RETURN VALUE
Returns CURLE_OK if HTTP is supported, CURLE_UNKNOWN_OPTION if not, or CURLE_OUT_OF_MEMORY if there was insufficient heap space. SEE ALSO
CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE(3), CURLOPT_COOKIE(3), CURLOPT_COOKIELIST(3), libcurl 7.54.0 December 21, 2016 CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR(3)
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