MacScan found this tracking cookie on both my boot volume and a back-up volume.

The plist, when opened in TextWrangler, looked exactly the same after it was replaced, when it tested negative, as it did beforehand, when it tested positive. (Sorry, but I screwed up and forgot to save the "tainted" file.)

Can somebody explain how the cookie attaches to a plist and why it isn't apparent that it's there?

Thanks.

I don't have any intelligence to report re your query.
However, even though I have Firefox set to "Tell websites I do not want to be tracked" and have separately blocked cookies named 2o7.net, every so often I find such a cookie listed in my Cookie file (which I examine and 'declutter' at least daily).

Apropos of that, I'm compiling my cookie thread, and one of the things I document in it is Firefox's accepting cookies (while in "no tracking" mode) that are identified as tracking cookies by Cookie.

'Tis truly a puzzlement (and judging from the way both Safari and Firefox seem to deal with cookies, I might also say "Oh! That felt good your majesty").

Here's an item to add to your cookie research. Since I have four hard drives, I'm currently working with OSX 10.7.4, but I also still have a fully functioning 10.6.8. The other two drives are for Time machine for each respective OS.

For comparison, I opened Safari on 10.6.8 and went to several web sites that I often frequent. I then ran MacScan and found 5 tracking cookies. I then rebooted into 10.7.4 and repeated the same action and found zero tracking cookies. Since installing 10.7.4 and its Combo update, I have not encountered a single tracking cookie when running MacScan. Is 10.7.4 that good or is there some other explanation? Yes, I did start by running MacScan just before the trial on each system so that I would be starting "clean."

Thanks for the info; I'm still running 10.6.8, so I'd never have know otherwise.

I dunno what to say, since I assume we're both running Safari 5.1.7, and I don't know why anything other than that would be pertinent.

The only guess that I can even begin to hazard is that it maaaaybe miiight have something to do with Safari's cache, which has been acting very weirdly since the recent update, sometimes being present in ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari, sometimes not, and sometimes present, but (Edit: saying it's) empty when it really isn't.

Edit: And just to confuse matters a bit, my tests with MacScan have shown it finding -0- tracking cookies while Cookie is telling me that I've got a bunch of them.

Yes I'm running Safari 5.1.7. I don't know what to think.