Chrome doesn't wipe private data from the purge: Google.com, YouTube

Gandalf_The_Grey

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Is this another case of one rule for the Chocolate Factory and one for everyone else?

Updated Google exempts its own websites from Chrome's automatic data-scrubbing feature, allowing the ads giant to potentially track you even when you've told it not to.

Programmer Jeff Johnson noticed the unusual behavior, and this month documented the issue with screenshots. In his assessment of the situation, he noted that if you set up Chrome, on desktop at least, to automatically delete all cookies and so-called site data when you quit the browser, it deletes it all as expected – except your site data for Google.com and YouTube.com.

While cookies are typically used to identify you and store some of your online preferences when visiting websites, site data is on another level: it includes, among other things, a storage database in which a site can store personal information about you, on your computer, that can be accessed again by the site the next time you visit. Thus, while your Google and YouTube cookies may be wiped by Chrome, their site data remains on your computer, and it could, in future, be used to identify you.

Johnson noted that after he configured Chrome to wipe all cookies and site data when the application closed, everything was cleared as expected for sites like apple.com. Yet, the main Google search site and video service YouTube were allowed to keep their site data, though the cookies were gone. If Google chooses at some point to stash the equivalent of your Google cookies in the Google.com site data storage, they could be retrieved next time you visit Google, and identify you, even though you thought you'd told Chrome not to let that happen.

Updated to add​

A Google spokesperson has been in touch to say the issue is a programming error, and will be fixed: "We are aware of a bug in Chrome that is impacting how cookies are cleared on some first-party Google websites. We are investigating the issue, and plan to roll out a fix in the coming days."[/quote}
Read the full article here at The Register:
Original blog post form Jeff Johnson here:
 

Ink

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Doesn't Microsoft Edge do the same for Windows 10 Users who log in with a Microsoft Account?
 

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