History of cookies

Gooner

I have looked into this and have provided a screenshot showing what cookie sees. I left my mac with both Safari and Firefox closed, came back a few hours later and BING! Cookie shows all these? Now remember, no browser was open during the time, and Cookie was started and showed nothing in there prior to me leaving my mac. Now there are over 400?

rhijohnson

I'm having the same problem. Is there a fix for this? :S

Gooner

I have even tried resetting Safari, clearing everything possible, yet it still reports on these sites. Any ideas yet? Why the heck is my complete browsing history retained? Is cookie really doing its job?

SweetP

I do some testing with this tomorrow morning.

SweetP

I can't reproduce this....

it appears that it is related to this:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2614434?start=0&tstart=0

people on that thread had success, by quitting all other apps when clearing cookies. i.e. iTunes, Mail... etc... as these apps share the global cookie store and can potentially recreate all the cookies even if deleted.

another user also reported he had cookies synching back from his iPad, and iPhone....

Gooner

I just rebooted my Mac and again Cookie reports over 400 tracking cookies, and again these are from sites from many yours ago, sites I have not been to recently and cant fathom why Cookie sees these.
I checked in my Cookie driectory and there are 2 files there, "Cookies.plist" and "HSTS.plist" These files do contain these sites. I have cat /dev/null to them and there are now empty. I will report back on wether cookie shows all these old sites

Gooner

OK
Update, since clearing out those 2 files I have not had a recurrance of the problem, so far. Why are these files not cleared by Cookie? Can you not add a function to Cookies to null these files?

For anyone else with the problem this is what I did

open a terminal window

cd ./Library/Cookies
ls -alrt (Shows all the files in the directory)
if the Cookies.plist and HSTS.plist are greater than 0 in size
cat /dev/null > ./Cookies.plist
cat /dev/null > ./HSTS.plist```

Fixed it for me

SweetP

Do you guys have any browser extensions installed?
try disabling them all, and seeing what happens.

one user has narrowed down an issue with the extension:
"Keep My Opt-Outs by Google"

there are probably many similar extensions which recreate all the OPT-OUT cookies, after Cookie clears them.

Gooner

The cookies were all reportedly Safari ones, and I havent used Safari for ages, didnt even know you could have add ons in Safari. Anyway since I cleared out those 2 files I havent had a recurrance of the problem

SweetP

ok thanks Gooner, i'll add in handling of these 2 files to 3.0.21.
thanks for the detective work.