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Removing the dreaded evercookie

Can anyone advise how to permanently remove an evercookie? I found Dominic White's blog about removing an evercookie in Safari. He provides a script, but I have little to no experience with running scripts on my Mac. I opened Terminal, pasted the script, and followed the instructions, but it didn't clear the evercookie. In all likelihood, I didn't run the script correctly.

If someone could provide step-by-step instructions for running a script, I would be very grateful. Here is the link to Dominic's blog with the script: http://singe.za.net/blog/archives/1014-Killing-the-Evercookie.html#extended

Thank you!

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8), Safari

Posted on Jan 29, 2011 5:10 AM

Reply
29 replies

Jan 29, 2011 4:46 PM in response to andyBall_uk

Thanks. I'll try that. I made the mistake of going to Samy Kamkar's website hoping for a fix. The site just wanted to access my hard drive over and over again until it crashed Safari. There's no denying it and just to read his site.

According to what I could capture before the crash, here's what it said:

Specifically, when creating a new cookie, it uses the following storage mechanisms when available:
- Standard HTTP Cookies
- Local Shared Objects (Flash Cookies)
- Silverlight Isolated Storage
- Storing cookies in RGB values of auto-generated, forced-cached PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out
- Storing cookies in Web History
- Storing cookies in HTTP ETags
- Storing cookies in Web cache
- window.name caching
-Internet Explorer userData storage
- HTML5 Session Storage
- HTML5 Local Storage
- HTML5 Global Storage
- HTML5 Database Storage via SQLite

TODO: adding support for:
- Caching in HTTP Authentication
- Using Java to produce a unique key based off of NIC info

Jan 29, 2011 5:05 PM in response to purplecat

yep, the site used to be less insistent, as I recall.

Any road, none of those explain how a cookie gets recreated. Sure, there are ways to id a user & even from that to say ooh, same computer that visited xyz.com, but while safari prefs are set to only from sites I visit, there's no way for a site to write another's cookie, that I know of; even supposing you were somehow repeatedly visiting sites that did that kind of thing.

Jan 30, 2011 8:43 AM in response to purplecat

I think it may be gone! I've been surfing around all morning, and it hasn't returned which is very unusual given its persistency. Maybe it cleared out after all the things I did yesterday coupled with turning off the computer for the night. For the record, I did not delete the PubSub folder as yet.

Will post again if it returns. If it does not, I will mark this question answered after a day or two.

Thanks Andy for all your help!

Jan 31, 2011 1:29 PM in response to purplecat

Ding Dong the Cookie's Gone! Not sure which step actually took care of the evercookie, and maybe it was a combination of the suggestions by Andy, but the dreaded evercookie is gone.

Also, this came from Dominic White, his instructions for deleting an evercookie:

The step-by-step would be to:

1) Reset Safari.
2) Run the script in terminal

If (2) isn't working for you, then try the following:

a) Delete all files in the following folders:
/Users/<your username>/Library/Cookies/
/Users/<your username>/Library/Safari/Databases/
/Users/<your username>/Library/Safari/LocalStorage/
/Users/<your username>/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects/
/Users/<your username>/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/
Users/<your username>/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Silverlight/is/

Mar 5, 2012 10:11 AM in response to purplecat

Hi PurpleCat! I don't know if I'am too late with my idea but this is the remedy I have found, although a bit delicate:


1- Go to applications


2- open disk utilitity


3- Make sure the FIRST AID is selected (because this is the delicate part) you could wipe your computer of everything you have in it.


4- Select the disk on left side and there will be 2 options at the bottom:

VERIFY DISK PERMISSION and REPAIR DISK PERMISSION


5- Click repair disk permission, and reparation will start inmediately


6- After everything is repaired, Restart your computer Almost sure, evercookie will be gone.


I'am still trying to find out if there's a way the computer can reject this kind of invasion of privacy.

Removing the dreaded evercookie

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