Cycling UK Forum

In an idle moment, I checked to see what cookies were stored in my browser and was rather horrified. I deleted them all and reset my Safari browser.

Then, I logged into this forum and watched what came up. There were three:
ctc.org.uk
google.com
googleapis.com

Then when I logged out, another one popped up:
statickflickr.com

Here's a screenshot from when I logged out.My question is, I understand the CTC cookie, but what are the other three for? What do they do?

There's me thinking this was about the baked goodies

google.com for tracking so they can see who's visited and when, and flickr is probably from some photographs you looked at. All benign.

Question is, are cookies good for a mid ride snack?

I got a Cookie from Bikeroutetoaster . Just ignore em and listen to the Eagles or something

Al

Most sites deposit cookies simply to carry your info over from one page or one session to the next. It's an innocent-enough procedure, and essential for the operation of many sites. In addition, however, some may also deposit cookies on behalf of other web sites, and the purpose of these is to record what you're interested in for marketing purposes.

There's a nifty Firefox add-on called Collusion that shows all your cookies as a blobs on the screen with lines connecting them: cookies that are only accessible from the sites you visited come up in a different colour from third-party cookies. After a few hours browsing the result is alarming.

In your case, the main ctc.org site probably uses Google to search across the site, and googleapis.com derives from that. Perfectly innocent. But try visiting just the homepage, nothing else, of the Daily Mail site (wear dark glasses and protective clothing) and the Collusion graph looks like this:



Daily Mail (the archaic D blob) deposits 9 cookies and informs the corresponding websites about your visit. One of these (you can see this with the program) is rubiconproject.com, which in turn shoves your data out to 6 other sites including Yahoo, another is openx.net which informs a handful more. Toddle round a couple more favourite places and your screen becomes a splatter of blobs and a tangle of lines.

Dunno if Firefox exists for the Mac, nor if Collusion exists for a putative Mac Firefox. Worth a look.

Thank guys.
Yes, I sometimes use Firefox on our Macs, but Safari is good nowadays - it wasn't in the past.

I've not looked at any photographs all day, so I don't know where that Flickr one came from. It only appeared as I logged out and it's not re-appeared despite my trying. I'd like a system that only allows cookies directly from the site you navigate to.

At this present moment, there are five cookies stored. Safari can be set to block cookies from 3rd parties and advertisers.

.

I think it may depend on exactly what you were doing and where you went, as I can't see all the cookies listed by Mick F.

I have cookies for the ctc.org.uk domain and for the forum.ctc.org.uk subdomain. The former are Google Analytics cookies. The latter are inherent session cookies for the phpBB software that runs this board.

If you go to the main CTC site, you get offered this cookie statement. Strictly, you ought to get it here too, but it would only be a nuisance, so I'm not bothered. Opting out of phpBB cookies would probably be a bad idea; at minimum it would lead to the system not knowing what threads I had read, and of course log-ins wouldn't work, so there isn't really much point in being given the chance to do that.

With a completely clean browser and then bringing up this site, I instantly get the following cookies:
ctc.org.uk
google.com

After logging in, the two above remain, and I get another:
googleapis.com

I can repeat this exercise and it's exactly the same every time.

Does this system know I'm on a Mac using Safari, and perhaps other computers using other browsers produce different cookies?

Just experimenting.

Reset Safari - clears history etc.
Remove all cookies.

Bring up this site, and BEFORE logging in, I get this:

Where did live.com and Youtube come from?

Have you got any add-ins, widgets or other windows? I've just repeated your test with a newly-installed Opera browser. Even after logging in, all I have is forum.ctc.org.uk cookies.

Not that I know of.
Summat strange going on, though I'm not that fussed really. They are only cookies and I've nothing to hide.

I wonder how the big iMac and Mrs Mick F's MacBook perform? I may check if/when I get another idle moment.

The only cookies you should see from this website are ones for the forum.ctc.org.uk hostname. Those may be shown as from ctc.org.uk in your browser, but in fact they're more specifically limited to the forum.ctc.org.uk website hostname (i.e. your Forum login cookies won't be sent to the main CTC website).

The cookies used are:

* "style_cookie" = I think to track your preferred style if you're not logged in.
* three cookies all starting with "phpbb3_" used to track your login session, if you log in.

You can disable all cookies for this site, but then you won't be able to log in. My recommended setting would be to disable cookies from all third-party domains (not that I'd expect any to be set, that's generally the best way to avoid being tracked too much as you browse the web).

In the screen shot only ctc.org.uk is setting cookies, google.com is using the browser cache (not sure what that means, as the browser uses a cache for every site) and live.com and youtube.com are making use of local storage (part of the new HTML 5 specification). Those three are almost certainly completely unrelated to your visiting the CTC Forum, and are probably there as optimisations to speed things up when you visit those three sites. Do you have toolbars or add-ons installed from those sites?

admin wrote:The only cookies you should see from this website are ones for the forum.ctc.org.uk hostname.

I've tried on our iMac and Mrs Mick F's MacBook and we all get:
ctc.org.uk
google.com
Then, after logging in, we get googleapis.com too.

The spurious YouTube and Live.com don't seem to come up any more. Strange.

admin wrote:Do you have toolbars or add-ons installed from those sites?

Not that I know of, and TBH, I wouldn't have them, so probably not.

I'm going to log off, delete everything and come back on on Firefox.

Back on using Firefox.

Cookies before I log in:


..... and after I log in:

Seems a bit different to me.
Wot's goin' on?

Why should Safari act differently to Firefox?