Question about Safari Privacy Preference

[mac_in_tosh]

If you click on the Manage Website Data button in the Safari Privacy preference, it lists websites that "have stored data that can be used to track your browsing" and gives you an option to remove selected ones or all of them. So I go ahead and remove all of them. Then all I do is go to my home page, which is DuckDuckGo. If I immediately then do the same thing in the Privacy preference, there are already about 200 obscure websites listed. What is this about?

 

[Ruggy]

I tried it and I just find the one Duck Duck Go site listed.
Maybe if you've got other pages open or something before you clear data but no, I'm not seeing that.

 

[mac_in_tosh]

Thanks for trying but your result, which is what I would expect, has me a bit worried now as to why it's not happening for me. I checked that nothing else was open, removed all the websites listed then clicked on Done. Before even leaving Safari preferences, I again clicked on the Manage Website Data button and again the window was loaded with a large number of websites. It's as if they are permanently there.

 

[mac_in_tosh]

The behavior I was encountering was on my old 2011 MB Pro, stuck on High Sierra. I tried it on my 2019 MB Pro running Catalina and got the expected result - once removed, the websites didn't come back to the list while still in Preferences. But once I posted here, over 140 websites populated the window. Most seem to be advertising related.

Safari on the old machine is doing other strange things - if I do Safari/Clear History it hangs and I have to force quit. So I guess it just may be time to think about not using the old machine any more if there's potential in this to be a security issue.