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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.
 
Cache::Memory(3pm)					User Contributed Perl Documentation					Cache::Memory(3pm)

NAME
Cache::Memory - Memory based implementation of the Cache interface SYNOPSIS
use Cache::Memory; my $cache = Cache::Memory->new( namespace => 'MyNamespace', default_expires => '600 sec' ); See Cache for the usage synopsis. DESCRIPTION
The Cache::Memory class implements the Cache interface. This cache stores data on a per-process basis. This is the fastest of the cache implementations, but is memory intensive and data can not be shared between processes. It also does not persist after the process dies. However data will remain in the cache until cleared or it expires. The data will be shared between instances of the cache object, a cache object going out of scope will not destroy the data. CONSTRUCTOR
my $cache = Cache::Memory->new( %options ) The constructor takes cache properties as named arguments, for example: my $cache = Cache::Memory->new( namespace => 'MyNamespace', default_expires => '600 sec' ); See 'PROPERTIES' below and in the Cache documentation for a list of all available properties that can be set. METHODS
See 'Cache' for the API documentation. PROPERTIES
Cache::Memory adds the property 'namespace', which allows you to specify a different caching store area to use from the default. All methods will work ONLY on the namespace specified. my $ns = $c->namespace(); $c->set_namespace( $namespace ); For additional properties, see the 'Cache' documentation. SEE ALSO
Cache AUTHOR
Chris Leishman <chris@leishman.org> Based on work by DeWitt Clinton <dewitt@unto.net> COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2003-2006 Chris Leishman. All Rights Reserved. This module is distributed on an "AS IS" basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either expressed or implied. This program is free software; you can redistribute or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. $Id: Memory.pm,v 1.9 2006/01/31 15:23:58 caleishm Exp $ perl v5.12.4 2011-08-05 Cache::Memory(3pm)
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