1206515 - data that is saved with PouchDB is undeletable within the browser settings

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1047098

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[chris0033547]

Attachment: error.mp4

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
Build ID: 20150826023504

Steps to reproduce:

I downloaded Ubuntu under the following URL and installed it in Virtualbox:

ftp://ftp.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/pub/mirror/linux/ubuntu-releases/14.04.3/ubuntu-14.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso

The sha1sum of the ISO is:

a3de42e9b563f3ccf100fa84f4f7c831e659320f

I updated the installed system after that and began my tests. The tests can be found in the screencast file included with this report.


Actual results:

The results of the tests can be found in the screencast file included with this report.


Expected results:

After a user deletes all cookies and the history through the Firefox settings and also deletes the cache and any offline-data in the settings PouchDB should forget about any data that was saved within it.

I'm not sure about the potential impact of this issue or whether it is a bug or a feature. But I believe that a malicious website could continue to track a user's behaviour if the user returns to that website even after the user used the browser's standard settings to clear cache, cookies, history and offline-browsing data/cache. The only way I found to get rid of the PouchDB data is to delete the Firefox profile. I was also able to reproduce this error/"Firefox feature" (?) in Windows 7.