Cookies set to "Never" but Safari now accepts all cookies anyway

Thanks nicoladie for the clear explanation.

> Until Apple had fixed these 2 bugs, the workaround is:

> 1. Close all windows before you quit Safari.

> 2. Then empty cache befoer quitting Safari.

> 3. Relaunch Safari, and empty cache immediately.

> 4. Relaunach Safari one more time.

>

> This will clear all you unwanted cookies and unwanted caches.

This did not work for me. Perhaps Apple has 3 bugs, not the 2 you describe. But no matter how many times I told Safari to empty the cache and then quit, the cache always came back, along with the hundreds of cookies in it, mostly from advertising and tracking companies I want nothing to do with.

This DID work: in Terminal,

cd /Users/{me}/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari

cp Cache.db sav-Cache.db

cp /dev/null Cache.db

chmod 0 Cache.db

Safari's cache is now a file of 0 size, not writeable by anybody.

That is a brute-force way to lock the cache so Safari can't write to it. Someday, when Safari is fixed, you have to revert it to be writeable to improve the browsing experience with cache enabled.

Cache is not a bad thing to have. Without cache, all your webpages have to be reload everytime. It slows things down and takes up too much network traffic unnecessarily. The reason why you have big cache files is because it saves you from reloading all the pages when you revisit them, if nothing in those webpages had changed in the meantime.

Usually cache should not be the problem. It's only when Apple trying to use cache to save the rejected cookies that should never had been accepted in the first place that is causing the problem. This is a huge privacy issue that Safari had broken, by accepting rejected cookies and saving them when they should never had been saved.

I know what cache is for. All of its advantages are negated, for me, by the persistence of unwanted tracking cookies. I am willing to put up with the performance hit, and the bandwidth bump, for the sake of controlling access to my own information. When and if Apple fixes this mess, I will re-enable the cache.

I actually did not make any difference if you lock Caches.db file. Safari still accepts all cookies regardless.

You can prove this easily. After you lock Caches.db files and make it to zero byte, block all cookies in Safari preferences settings, and if you didn't close all the windows before you quit, next time you relaunch Safari with those unwanted cookies will reappear again.

How do they reappear? Just go back to Privacy settings, it shows no extra cookies. So far so good.

But now, just click "Details" button of the "Cookies and other website data", all those unwanted cookies from the previous session magically will reappear.

This proves that when Lion preserves the previous state of Safari upon relaunch, it re-populates all those unwanted cookies, even though it did not write it to cache, it saved those rejected cookies in the "saved states".

This shows that Lion actually keeps everything, including rejected cookies in saved state, independent of the cache stores. So it may require to block Safari from saving its state to completely eliminate any trace of the rejected cookies that should never be accepted in the first place.

Ok, the only way that I can completely block the unwanted cookies is to use a firewall to filter them, such as Netbarrier, and set the cookie filter to allow cookies only from the Trusted Sites that you specified, and block all other cookies before Lion/Safari even get to see them.

This does not work for me.

I did as you suggest, leaving the Privacy Preference panel open. When I looked a few minutes later, dozens of new objects had accumulated in it: cookies, cache, plug-ins, and local storage, many from 3rd parties. (The cache was puzzling to me, as I have disabled it as described in an earlier post.)

Safari 5.1.3 (7534.53.10) on Lion 10.7.3.

The reason why you don't see those unwanted cookies show up is because Safari does not update them in the preferences privacy tab to display them to you.

But as soon as you quit Safari and relaunch them, they will all reappear instantly.

The trick is to empty cache immediately after the relaunch (and close all opened windows immediately).

Then relaunch Safari the second time or the third time, these unwanted cookies will disappear forever.

(That is, whether Preferences tell you if the cookies are there or not is irrelevant, they are saved internally. It is just a matter of when Safari will display them to you in Preferences. Safari hide it from you in the current session. But once you close the session, and relaunch it, those cookies will be re-populated in the next browsing session.)

The problem is Safari lied about rejecting the cookies. It certainly tells the website that you rejected the cookies (which is true, unless you enabled cookies), but it secretly saved all rejected cookies.

Now, even in the same browsing session with the Privacy pop-up still open, if you switch from reject to accept cookies, all those previously rejected cookies will be populated in the "Details" button, even when the pop-up is still opened. It does not accept cookies from the moment you turned it on, it actually accepts all cookies before you turned it on, except that it didn't show you until you switch to accept cookie. That is when their lies came out in the open.

I've tries several ways, but the controls are just not there to have true control.

Changing the setting to 3rd party is the only way I can get back into banking and here.

I may go look for 3rd party cookie control where precise controls are dialed in.

One other related, is Google Mail.

Just discovered settings there today to allow tracking or delete & pause it.

Fellow responded just like Apples cookies, you may think they were deleted,,,,

Here is the Scoop on most of it.

To get around Safari's default blocking, Google exploited a loophole in the browser's privacy settings.