Strange Cookie after using !yt that I can't disable

Brave Search
1

Having used Brave Search for a little while now, I noticed that using the !yt quick search option automatically enables a cookie on youtube.com from search.brave.com. What is this cookie and how can I disable it from automatically being allowed?

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Firefox version: 89.0.1 (64-bit)

OS: Windows 10

2

You can read about cookies on Brave Search over here:

https://search.brave.com/help/anonymous-cookies

1 Like
3

I get that it needs a cookie to remember it’s settings, but why is it cross site and only showing up in YouTube after I do a !yt search? That seams unnecessary and doesn’t make any sense.

4

@Thedudeaman,
Is the drop down you’re showing in the screen shot you shared a specific extension? I’m unable to reproduce this in FF on my end, nor am I able to see that particular drop down on any site.

5

No, it’s only part of the Firefox site permissions section of the address bar. I have cross-site cookies blocked by default, which is likely why Firefox is explicitly showing that search.brave.com is allowed on YouTube.

6

Is that how you’ve got it configured?

Screenshot from 2021-06-23 12-36-51
Screenshot from 2021-06-23 12-36-51922Ă—927 77.4 KB

7

I have it set to the “strict” option

8

I was able to recreate it on a clean VM.

  1. Change any settings on search.brave.com
  2. Set privacy to strict and Block audio and video autoplay for all websites in firefox settings
    This causes the “permissions” button to pop up on youtube, which is also where you can find the cookie.
  3. Search anything on brave search using !yt
  4. Click on a video and the permissions button will show up. clicking it will reveal that a cross site brave cookie is allowed on the site.
9

Thanks for the detailed steps. I was able to reproduce in Firefox and ended up with this cookie:

1||olnt|1|search.brave.com|/|2147483647|1625278124190085|1625278055526053|1|0|0|2|2|2

which corresponds to the Open Links in New Tab option I enabled in Step 1.

I looked through all of the network requests in the developer tools however and I didn’t see that cookie being sent to any other host, or to Brave after the search was done.

I suspect it might be a bug in Firefox where the cookie-tracking code gets confused somehow and then attributes the cookie to the wrong page.

You could file a bug with Mozilla with these reproduction steps. I don’t think the problem is on our end. This is a first-party cookie used to save your preferences. It’s not used cross-domain (it would not make any sense to do so in fact).