Website saving data without cookies?

goodValue

My browser clears cookies on closing, so I was surprised by the following:
  I visited a forum and looked at a few topics.
  A few days later, I went to the same forum. The topics I had looked at previously had a different colour indicating I had already visited them?

Could the website have saved the information about visited topics on their database, and when I went to their webpage the next time, they managed to identify 
my laptop and thus match it with the topics visited?

Neil_Jones

On most web forums cookies are only used to keep you logged in and to populate the "Who's Online" (if appropriate) feature.

Other functionality/tracking of read topics will be stored in the website's database and presented to you through the software.  Otherwise it would keep flagging the same "new" topics to you every time you cleared cookies.

This assumes  of couse you logged into that web forum with a username like you do here.

debitcardmayhem

I’m not sure, I am out road testing a new iPad so can’t verify until I get home with my real pcs but the feature described is a browser history not cookie feature.

goodValue

This assumes  of couse you logged into that web forum with a username like you do here.

I didn't log in.
So my first thought was that it somehow recognised my laptop.

goodValue

debitcardmayhem said:

I’m not sure, I am out road testing a new iPad so can’t verify until I get home with my real pcs but the feature described is a browser history not cookie feature.

The browser clears when it's closed, so it shouldn't be a history feature.

Jenni_D

Which browser?

k_man

And which website?

goodValue

It's Chrome with the following settings:

  Block third-party cookies

  Clear cookies and site data when you close all windows

  Send a "Do Not Track" request with your browsing traffic

I recently added a cookie exception to make it easy to do two step verification with email.

I didn't think this was of any consequence for this current problem unless ....

  Yahoo own TripAdvisor, which can then save my activity via the login.yahoo.com cookie??

400ixl

You don't need cookies to fingerprint a device and user, there are lots of other ways of doing it.

What website is it?

Jenni_D

400ixl said:

What website is it?

Presumably TripAdvisor.

Are you logged into a Google account when you're using Chrome?

goodValue

I believe I login to google once a week, but do not access anything else during this time.
And I clear the browser after finishing.