Even if you will disable settings in Google Chrome to remove all your website cookies and site data when you close the browser, it will still stores data for itself and YouTube, according to Mac programmer Jeff Johnson.
For almost three decades, cookies placed by relatively unknown companies on nearly every website have fueled advertising on the internet. Cookies are a tool within browsers that allow website operators to save data about users so that they can keep a particular user logged into a website over multiple days.
In his writing Johnson said, “Perhaps this is just a Google Chrome bug, not intentional behavior, but the question is why it only affects Google sites, not non-Google ones”. I’ve tested using the Google Chrome version 86.0.4240.75 for macOS, but this behavior was also happening in the latest version of Chrome. I don’t know when it started.”
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In order to delete all of site cookies and data every time you quit the browser you can simply go to Settings, then “Privacy and security” and then “Cookies and other site data” and then turn on the “Clear cookies and site data when you quit Chrome.”
One would assume that when the settings have been changed, this should work on all sites however according to Johnson, it doesn’t.
“Chrome exempts Google’s own sites, such as Search and YouTube, from this setting,” he wrote. “After I quit and relaunch, the [YouTube] cookies are deleted, but the database storage, local storage, and service workers are still there!”
Johnson had to manually add Google.com and YouTube.com to the list of sites that can never use cookies at all. Storing site data allows Google to track users who might have thought they were exempting themselves from such things.
“Many users set Chrome to automatically delete cookies-and-site-data on exit … to prevent being stalked around the web even though it often requires them to log back into websites the next time they visit due to their per-session cookies being wiped,” The Register’s Kieren McCarthy noted. McCarthy reached out to Google for comment, and the search giant claimed it was an innocent mistake.
“We are aware of a bug in Chrome that is impacting how cookies are cleared on some first-party Google websites,” Google told The Register. We are investigating the issue, and plan to roll out a fix in the coming days.”