iOS 10.3 Safari cookies won't delete

I wish I had read these posts before I spent hours trying to remove some sites that wont delete from the Advanced section of Safari.

So now I have removed the safari icon and it wont come back to Apple comes up with a fix

Again, tygb, this is about iOS safari, not macOS safari.

The cookies in question fingerprint a browser, which is a unique identification of sorts, and they track you wherever you go even in private browsing mode. When you get into a website such as identity.com, which is in the business of selling information about you to anyone who asks, that's a real problem.

Here's a explainer article from 2015 about the flaw Apple has not fixed.

http://www.businessinsider.com/super-cookies-hsts-security-private-2015-1

"Apple users are particularly vulnerable, as their devices do not have a function that lets users delete super cookies from their browsers."

HSTS Supercookies cannot be deleted except by completely resetting the phone. What I am asking Apple to do at minimum is to provide a way to delete all cookies that actually works for all cookies.

The user cannot change website behaviour , the website developers better knows , once you browse the website , cookies will be saved , set to private browsing and avoid saving cookies may be it is for iOS Safari or Mac OS Safari , of course in Apple iOS you have to reset the phone completely , you can send a brief feed back to Apple , so that they will definitely read it .

I recognize you are trying to be helpful.

Long post ahead not intended to rant but in the interest of technical facts to drive the resolution :

the cookies we are talking about can be read and possibly persistently set even in private browsing mode because the vector for these 'supercookies' is the HSTS support in the browser on the device. Even in private browsing mode it is trivial to fingerprint the browser and store that unique id. Private browsing only is intended to clear history etc when you're done with your session and what I'm saying is these supercookies aren't reliably removed then either.

The problem is both malicious developers and non malicious developers can use this pathway and currently there is no way to control it even with extensions like content blockers. This results in a great reduction in internet privacy even if you use a VPN, dnscrypt, and so on because they have a fingerprint of your specific browser and can track you wherever.

The cookies also cannot be deleted on iOS safari because the user cannot delete "caches" i.e. a type of local storage object used like a cookie. Therefore when you choose to delete cookies these caches are not deleted.

To get a resolution we are saying allow the caches to be deleted on iOS without completely resetting your phone on every new supercookie infection.

I've been having the same trouble for some time. Currently the cookie with zero bytes, that is showing is congress.gov, that is on my iPhone se, I am unable to remove it. This is a problem with Safari itself & has been going on for some time. On my iPad its google.com & congress.gov, this is extremely dangerous for Apple users. I also have no way of clicking on links to open as it goes directly to Safari, I have to copy the link and use the browser I use. I've gone to Privacy|Analytics Data and what I am seeing is frighting. I have a crash that says {"app_name":"Unknown""timestamp......how do you fix an unknown app, exeption type: (SIGKILL), filtered syslog: none found, I have no way of updateing to the current version with the new security features because a bug hit the brain service, iTunes is of no use because it just recreates the problem. The problem is maybe an SQL injection, not sure. But I can not for the life of me remove these cookies that falsly say Zero Bytes but track you just the same. Please lmk if you've found a work around, thanks

That's pretty much the work-around I've been using. Check out the Aloha app, I love it. The copy paste isn't much fun but worth it. They are working on one for the iPad. You may also want to check out gnu.org, they're work is pretty amazing. The way Safari is configured to connect to your mail, & abc, with no way to change that is something I may consider working on, I hope the Engineers get this one out of the way, far too much memory leaks. Thanks for the response

i have same a problem on my iPhone 6 & 7. I deleted100 times, but it is still there; I can not delete this particular date from web site data. It came from e-mail accidentally opened. I hope somebody helps me.

I have been so frustrated with this problem. I only use Safari for my iOS devices, iPhone and iPad.

I have gone into the advanced section and deleted each cookie. They appear to disappear but when I check again all of the cookies are there many with mb of data and many with data of 0.

Cookies should always be able to be deleted. You can still login to sites as your login is what your account is based on.

I have never had this problem with previous versions of Safari.

Apple where is the fix to this obvious bug?

Pack-n-Heat wrote:

But isn't it interesting i had to use Firefox to post this as Safari on my mac wouldn't work on this site?

I'm sure if you start your own thread, someone will be able to help you resolve your issue. Safari works just fine posting on these forums for me and lots of other people.

IdrisSeabright wrote:

Pack-n-Heat wrote:

But isn't it interesting i had to use Firefox to post this as Safari on my mac wouldn't work on this site?

I'm sure if you start your own thread, someone will be able to help you resolve your issue. Safari works just fine posting on these forums for me and lots of other people.

But it's so much more fun to pretend that it doesn't.

Lawrence Finch wrote:

IdrisSeabright wrote:

Pack-n-Heat wrote:

But isn't it interesting i had to use Firefox to post this as Safari on my mac wouldn't work on this site?

I'm sure if you start your own thread, someone will be able to help you resolve your issue. Safari works just fine posting on these forums for me and lots of other people.

But it's so much more fun to pretend that it doesn't.

And I can't activate the FM radio.....

Same here, not fixed.

Would like to access the filesystem from my computer to clean it. Did such stuff in the past, but then read it is not possible anymore. Deleted all Temp folders in the apps. Some needed to be reinstalled. I understand, that you shouldn't do this, but even all apps can set what they want (cookies etc.) and don't let you clean up and spy on you.

And in Safari now the same. Option to get rid of that stuff, but does not work. Too bad.

alltakenalready wrote:

Same here, not fixed.

Would like to access the filesystem from my computer to clean it. Did such stuff in the past, but then read it is not possible anymore. Deleted all Temp folders in the apps. Some needed to be reinstalled. I understand, that you shouldn't do this, but even all apps can set what they want (cookies etc.) and don't let you clean up and spy on you.

If you believe an app is spying on you, get rid of it. Apps don't need cookies to save data about you; apps have a database to save anything they want. More to the point, if you believe your phone or Apple is spying on you, get rid of it and go back to a basic dumb phone. But even they can spy on you, so better not have any mobile phone. There are far more effective ways to spy on you than with cookies.

I am running 10.3.3 and no it does not fix the super cookie issue!

There is one stubborn one that will not delete, no matter what I do.

It is not the same one others have issue with so it has to do with the iOS and just a particular site.

UGH!!!

Sorry, posted too soon. When installing 10.3.3, it wiped clean the old super cookies from Safari. I had been fuming over this glitch for months and months, so was encouraged thinking the problem was fixed. But yes, ARRGH, new super cookies have since appeared and cannot be deleted. SO DISAPPOINTED APPLE!