Comment by hugefaggot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hugefaggot | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

    Cookies set by the Safe Browsing servers to
    protect the service from abuse are stored in
    a separate cookie jar so that they are not
    mixed with regular browsing/session cookies.

And how are these cookies cleared? Seems like as soon as some sort of ID appears in one of these cookies, XKeyScore will track your every (physical) move with it even if you take care to delete all your regular cookies and don't browse the same sites on different networks. Why does this protocol even allow for cookies to be set at all in the first place?

Since Firefox 41 [1] Safe Browsing traffic all uses https, so it should not be vulnerable to passive collection techniques like XKeyScore.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1109475

> Why does this protocol even allow for cookies to be set at all in the first place?

The answer is right there in the sentence you quoted: "to protect the service from abuse". How that's supposed to work (i.e. how cookies are supposed to protect against abuse) is another question.

> And how are these cookies cleared?

They are cleared the same way as normal cookies: they are visible in the cookie manager where they can be manually deleted, and they are generally included in all of the other cookie-clearing mechanisms.

You can find out more about the ways to control cookies in Firefox here: https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/tweaking-cookies-for-pri...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com