Can anyone clear Google cookies from Chrome? | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone clear Google cookies from Chrome?

12 pointscnd7 comments

I notice today it's impossible to clear google cookies. I had several tabs open, including one to gmail and one to calendar, and I have "Do Not Track" set to "yes".

Then, I clear cookies and close my browser.

Then, I open my browser (it re-loads all my tabs automatically).

As soon as possible, I again clear my cookies.

Finally, when I load the google home page, it still has my account showing in the top corner (my logo, my name, and my email).

My guess is google have some JS which detects cookie loss, and immediately reconstitutes the lost cookies - so all my "clear" requests are being surreptitiously violated...

Does anyone know how to tell chrome to actually get rid of google cookies? Even the "new tab" window contacts google and sets more cookies every time!

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This is a resault of the Chrome feature called "Account Consistency" that signs you in and out of Chrome itself and Google Services in synchronisation

You can disable the feature under "Identity consistency between browser and cookie jar #enable-account-consistency" chrome://flags/#enable-account-consistency

You ROCK! Thanks heaps for pointing out this obscure setting :-)

Shameless plug - I'm actually working on a small tool at the moment to help with this[1] (the repo is a mess as the project is very much under development).

But my new approach to cookies, especially with Google (I use Firefox over Chrome actually), is to just remove them from their physical location - the sqlite database that browsers put on your computer.

I imagine Google plays all kinds of tricks and games in their browser to prevent their cookies from going away (another reason I stay away from Chrome).

[1] https://github.com/ralston3/moz_cookies

is messing with sqlite database safe while its opened in the browser? is it even possible? I know for example Chrome locks History database while running.

I was thinking of different approach, an extension implementing firewall shim on top of cookie/localStorage/sessionStorage. Selectively prevent the storage in the first place. "Fun" fact - afaik you cant disable/limit localStorage in Chrome/Blink, you can only bulk disable all forms of data storage including cookies.

As we have just found out... "cookies" have evolved exactly the same way that malware has.

Persistence is maintained without writing to disk, using a variety of methods.

Three of those which I now know about include a) all google pages have javascript which polls or gets an event when cookies change, and this script fires to rejuvenate the cookies using an ID stored inside the page HTML. b) some google pages store an ID inside the browser URL, so the next page you visit tells google who you were again via the referrer c) Chrome itself tracks you if you don't switch off that obscure setting mentioned above.

Probably the more-likely method of solving this problem is to poison the cookies, instead of remove them. Google will be tracking billions of devices, so it seems probable that their client side code will not know the difference between a "real" and a "fake" cookie - so long as your code produces cookies that their JS etc thinks is "real", it's not going to trigger the rejuvenation step.

This isnt a problem,. you can override default cookie method

    var cookieDesc = Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(Document.prototype, 'cookie') ||
                     Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(HTMLDocument.prototype, 'cookie');
    if (cookieDesc && cookieDesc.configurable) {
        Object.defineProperty(document, 'cookie', {
            get: function () {
                return cookieDesc.get.call(document);
            },
            set: function (val) {
                console.log(val);
                cookieDesc.set.call(document, val);
            }
        });
    }

and filter what gets stored before it touches the Cookie database.

if you need a browser without cookies, use open guest window. It doesn't log cookies to your browser but have in mind that it doesn't save your browsing history.

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