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xraygord
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Post Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 12:37 pm 
 

I signed into ebay from work one time.

Now when I view items on  ebay at home and return to work the next day, the items viewed at home are shown on the main ebay page as my last items viewed on my work PC even though I am not signed any longer on my work PC.  :?  

Anyone else experience this?


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throwi
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Post Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 1:34 pm 
 

Yes, that happens to me all the time.  As an IT guy, I can think of many ways this can be done, especially on the server side of things.  They can store recent transactions and display them when you log in.  I doubt they are using cookies - two different PCs will not share cookies.

Less of a privacy issue, more of a convenience capability.

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xraygord
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Post Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 6:41 pm 
 

throwi wrote in ebay privacy issue:Yes, that happens to me all the time.  As an IT guy, I can think of many ways this can be done, especially on the server side of things.  They can store recent transactions and display them when you log in.  I doubt they are using cookies - two different PCs will not share cookies.

Less of a privacy issue, more of a convenience capability.

~throwi



The thing is I am not logged in, but it still shows what I viewed at home (logged in) while I view ebay at work (not logged in) But once I cleared the cookies, it didn't show those items.

Thanks for the reply though.


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stylean
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Post Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 10:12 pm 
 

You can put pretty much anything into a cookie; it's free form text more or less.  They probably associate a machine with a user on the backend and stuff something into the cookie to make the correlation once they receive it and subsequently write it back to the machine.  But yes, they are doing something with the cookies, as you accurately surmised.

And it could be a privacy issue depending on what you search for and the degree of public-ness of the work PC.  Never ever log into a shared machine to use it for something you would not be comfortable with the next user discovering.  Even if you click the "log me out" button at the end.  There are a ton of ways to look for avenues of exploitation in these circumstance.

throwi wrote in ebay privacy issue:Yes, that happens to me all the time.  As an IT guy, I can think of many ways this can be done, especially on the server side of things.  They can store recent transactions and display them when you log in.  I doubt they are using cookies - two different PCs will not share cookies.

Less of a privacy issue, more of a convenience capability.

~throwi
  

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throwi
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Post Posted: Fri Apr 19, 2013 9:23 am 
 

xraygord wrote in ebay privacy issue:
The thing is I am not logged in, but it still shows what I viewed at home (logged in) while I view ebay at work (not logged in) But once I cleared the cookies, it didn't show those items.

Thanks for the reply though.


Ah, a bit embarrassing when I fail to read the entire post thoroughly.  As stylean also mentioned, cookies can track quite a bit - it's likely that your local cookie on the desktop has similar info to the one at home including transaction ids, account and location info, among other things.  Although some websites still use server-side information, client-side options are the de-facto standard now.  I'm a database guy so I focus on storing things at the server level within an RDBMS.

I assumed that your work system is your own office laptop or desktop; if it's a shared system, then again, as stylean describes, there *are* inherit issues with cookies, passwords and other convenience-related options.  We have an internet kiosk system at work that employees can use that has separate logins for each person - this keeps things more secure.

Sorry if I misled or provided bad info, I posted too quickly for sure!

~throwi
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