Flash Cookies, a Little-Known Privacy Threat

Wiini recommends a blog posting exploring Flash cookies, a little-known threat to privacy, and how you can get control of them. 98% of browsers have Macromedia Flash Player installed, and the cookies it enables have some interesting properties. They have no expiration date; they store 100 KB of data by default, with an unlimited maximum; they can't be deleted by your browser; and they send previous visit information and history, by default, without your permission. I was amazed at some of the sites, not visited in a year or more, that still had Flash cookies on my machine. Here's the user-unfriendly GUI for deleting them, one at a time, each one requiring confirmation.

Comments

Re:And this ...

[Hatta]

Why should we all accept a technology that is almost always used inappropriately? It's not being a luddite to expect people to use the right tool for the job. Flash is a technology that's good for vector animations. Stuff like homestar runner benefit from using flash, and nobody is going to complain that such a site uses flash.

But what about all the websites that use flash based navigation? Does flash do anything that they can't do with html/javascript? No. Then what's the point? It's not progress if it doesn't enable you to do anything new. It's just dumb.

And then there's sites like YouTube which use flash to serve up videos. I mean, come on. Embedding a video file in a flash application makes about as much sense as embedding an image in flash. The right thing to do is to send the video over http, and let the browser decide what to do with it. Just like we do with .jpg, .pdf, .mp3, and everything else on the internet.

So don't give me this bullshit about flash haters being anti-progress, because there's really very little that flash actually does that anyone actually needs. It's almost always the wrong tool for the job.

p.s. pine still works great, what's your problem with it?