Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rajaganesh87 2821 days ago
I think this is required for my-activity to work - https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity
2 comments

If I build a service that needs a cookie to persist in the event of a user purging their cookies I don't think Google would accept that and just not delete it. The same is true for Google. If a user purges their cookies there shouldn't be any set afterwards.

However... what's probably happening here is that the cookie is being deleted but then created again immediately afterwards because something in the user's browser is connected to a Google server and that makes a new cookie if it detects the old one has gone away. The message in the tweet is informing the user that will happen. Arguably that's a reasonably useful notification - it stops the user mistakenly believing purging their cookies will log them out.

EDIT: Or, more likely, Google are actually storing the user's logged in state in localstorage or something, so clearing cookies won't log you out because there isn't a cookie.

Agree, in the "Clear browsing data" there's a clear message. Fine.

However in chrome://settings/siteData?search=cookies there's just a "Remove all" button which in fact doesn't remove all cookies. See: https://twitter.com/ctavan/status/1044517442993737729

Forget about the ‘remove all’ button. Clicking the huge delete button with ‘trash’ icon that is supposed to delete the cookie one by one just hides the entry and then every Google Cookie is back when you refresh the page.
Just to play devils advocate. There could be some security advantage in using cookies rather than some other mechanism for storing user state information. It could reduce the attack surface.
I really hope not, no way Google can just change the nature of cookies in their browser to suit one of their services, it's just too much.