[Novalug] revisited - is your firefox browser history really cleaned out?

Mark Smith mark@winksmith.com
Mon May 18 23:39:46 EDT 2015


very interesting.  it is a well known fact that deleting from a database
doesn't necessarily mean removing the data having said that, sounds like
you can open a bug against firefox for that.

check to see if chrome does that and collect your $$ bounty!!


On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 11:06:22PM -0400, Bonnie Dalzell via Novalug wrote:
> so today I emptied all but 20 or so links from the firefox browser
> history. i also have around 150 items in the bookmarks.
> 
> opening up places.sqlite and looking at it in a hex editor showed a
> lot of zeros and some lines of ascii.
> 
> then I used the command line strings (recently learned about this -
> thanks) on it and it generated a file wiht 11,000 lines of ascii
> text. most of them not very informative but 2668 occurances of the
> word "http://" - the start of a link.
> 
> then used sqlite3 to dump the file into a .csv file and got 1208
> links. most of which are links to junk advertisement which are not
> things i saved in my bookmarks or left when I cleaned the cache by
> hand.
> 
> so it does appear that cleaning your cache can still leave stuff in
> it that you thought you got rid of.
> 
> the obvious solution for someone with real worries about security is
> to delete the file places.sqlite from their computer.
> 
> any opinions from those of you who know a lot more about privacy and
> security than I do.

-- 
Hei konā mai
Mark Smith
mark@winksmith.com



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