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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.
 
volmgt_running(3VOLMGT) 				Volume Management Library Functions				   volmgt_running(3VOLMGT)

NAME
volmgt_running - return whether or not volume management is running SYNOPSIS
cc [ flag ... ] file ... -lvolmgt [ library ... ] #include <volmgt.h> int volmgt_running(void); DESCRIPTION
This function is obsolete. The management of removable media by the Volume Management feature, including vold, has been replaced by soft- ware that supports the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). Programmatic support for HAL is through the HAL APIs, which are documented on the HAL web site. See hal(5). volmgt_running() tells whether or not Volume Management is running. RETURN VALUES
volmgt_running() always returns 0 indicating Volume Management (as implemented by vold) is not running. ERRORS
volmgt_running() will fail, returning 0, if a stat(2) or open(2) of /dev/volctl fails, or if any of the following is true: ENXIO Volume Management is not running. EINTR An interrupt signal was detected while checking to see if Volume Management was running. EXAMPLES
Example 1 Using volmgt_running() To see if Volume Management is running: if (volmgt_running() != 0) { (void) printf("Volume Management is running "); } else { (void) printf("Volume Management is NOT running "); } ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |MT-Level |MT-Safe | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Interface Stability |Obsolete | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
cc(1B), open(2), stat(2), volmgt_check(3VOLMGT), volmgt_inuse(3VOLMGT), attributes(5), hal(5) NOTES
Volume Management must be running for many of the Volume Management library routines to work. SunOS 5.11 8 Mar 2007 volmgt_running(3VOLMGT)
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