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Include cookie duration in tracking heuristic

Open cowlicks opened this issue 8 years ago • 6 comments

Once this is done, we should remove weatherzone.com.au from the CBL (#1543).

We should also revisit cookies set by things on the CBL to see what their duration is. And what this would fix.

cowlicks avatar Aug 02 '17 01:08 cowlicks

Yep, we should probably account for short-term cookies and maybe also session cookies (https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/1539#issuecomment-319172618).

Removing domains from the yellowlist is dicey as long as pre-2017.7.24 releases are still around (https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/1474#issuecomment-314803154).

ghostwords avatar Aug 02 '17 16:08 ghostwords

Since we've mistakenly tied privacy badger versions to cookieblock list behavior, now would be a good time to fix any problems with it. We can make new versions pull from a new URL. And we won't have to worry about breaking old versions.

cowlicks avatar Aug 02 '17 18:08 cowlicks

Ignoring session cookies seems like the right thing to do given that session cookies are meant to expire at the end of the browsing session (although apparently browsers preserve session cookies when you set your browser to continue where you left off), which seems to make session cookies much less effective for tracking versus cookies with (far-future) expiration dates.

I think it's worth visiting a bunch of sites (from error reports?) and logging what Badger learned to block because of session cookies alone. If it's all non-tracking domains, let's do it.

ghostwords avatar Sep 14 '17 22:09 ghostwords

What's the status on this issue? It looks like we've manually fixed a lot of session cookie-related issues.

bcyphers avatar May 03 '18 02:05 bcyphers

It's in the should-probably-happen-but-comes-with-hard-to-understand-implications-and-so-we've-been-collecting-evidence-and-making-one-off-fixes phase. It seems pretty important to look into further, hence it's one of our numerous high priority issues.

ghostwords avatar May 03 '18 02:05 ghostwords

Now that the big badger-sett scanner is up and running, we can try to get a sense of what most trackers use for expiration times etc. Note to self to do a scan that saves cookie lifetimes.

bcyphers avatar Sep 13 '18 01:09 bcyphers