Web Storage and privacy.
I was experimenting with HTML-5 Web
Storage when I realized Safari
wasn’t showing me my storage use under the
Safari⇒Preferences…⇒Security⇒Show Databases panel. A little find
action shows that they live in databases named things like
~/Library/Safari/LocalStorage/http_SITENAME_0.localstorage, and good
heavens there are a lot of them!
Most of them are for some sort personal information harvesting operation named loomia. They seem to be about personalized recommendations, but I don’t remember authorizing them to collect information on me, and I sure didn’t ask them to tag me with a tracking code tucked away in a location I can’t see that will survive cookie clearing.
Most of the rest are of the form IXAIInvited{number} = true. I have no idea what that is about, but the number isn’t long enough to be a unique identifier for me.
So Safari guys: I know you’ve been busy, but how about letting me see and manage my localStorage from the user interface?
(And while you’re at it, either make localStorage.setItem() work for
objects, or update the documentation to mention that it is strings only.
And give me my hour of debugging time back.)