Grabbing Cookies?

[shadowayex]

A buddy of mine is wanting me to make a statistical system that collects information on the users who come to it to figure out where they've been. He wants to use this to generate lists of the places his users like to go, or something of the sort. With this, he plans on showing links to the popular web sites on his site to help give his site a slight edge or something of the sort.I don't know the full details, but I was just wondering if there was a mechanism that allowed such viewing of cookies set by other domains. I doubt there is, but I don't want to tell him there isn't when I don't know 100% that there is not.

[boen_robot]

You're right... and you're sort of wrong too.You're right in that there's no way to view cookies from other domains. Absolutely no way. If you find a way, you've found a browser security issue and should report it to the browser vendor immediatly.However, how do you think sites like StatCounter and the like gather their data? They gather the data of advertising sites, which are in turn used on many sites across the web. When sites A and B reference ads from the advertising site, that site in turn collects the accumulated views, HTTP headers and cookies collected during the requests originating from both A and B. The site itself can only read its own cookies, but if the cookie was set during the reference from site A, it will be available even when afterwards the user visits site B.If you can convince domain owners to place a file reference (be it an image, an iframe or a script) into their pages, then you can collect the statistical information for them. But to collect statistics on arbitrary sites? Forget it.

[shadowayex]

Ah, makes sense.Well, you did bring up some interesting methods of collecting statistics. I'll talk to my buddy and see what he wants to do.Thanks.