Slashdot Mirror
The Advertisers are Watching You
pcause noted that the New York Times is running a story about the information being collected about you by internet advertisers. Of course much of this is not news to you, but it's important that the mainstream media is more aware of the issues surrounding this.
One thing that people don't clear as often as cookies is the Flash Shared Object repository. A lot of advertisers use this to store persistent user data in lieu of cookies to monitor viewer activities.
I personally use two ways to block this. First is NoScript which is a must have companion to Adblock. Adblock stops the known stuff, NoScript stops the unknown stuff.
Second, on Windows, I deleted the Flash Player folder in Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Macromedia, and created a text file with the exact same name as the folder. This makes the Flash player unable to write any persistent data to disk. However, this does sometimes mess up sites like YouTube which store legit preferences.
Third, I run a utility called ccleaner (used to be called Crap Cleaner) which is great for removing random junk left over in Windows apps.
This is not perfect, but good for most sites. If you want better security, consider running your Web browser in a VM that dumps all changes since a known good snapshot. I do this for some entertainment Flash sites because I don't feel like allowing, even temporarily, all the data mining companies write access to my machine.