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Adobe Flash Cookies Raising Privacy Questions Again

Posted by kdawson on from the flash-in-the-pan dept.

Nearly a year after we discussed the privacy implications of Flash cookies, they are in the news again as the US government considers revising its cookie policy. Wired covers a study out of UC Berkeley exposing questionable practices used by many of the Internet's most-visited Web sites (abstract). The most questionable activity the report exposes is known as "respawning": after a user has deleted browser tracking cookies, some sites will use information in Flash cookies to recreate them. The report names two companies, Clearspring and QuantCast, whose technologies reinstate cookies for other Web sites. "Federal websites have traditionally been banned from using tracking cookies, despite being common around the web — a situation the Obama administration is proposing to change as part of an attempt to modernize government websites. But the debate shouldn't be about allowing browser cookies or not, according Ashkan Soltani, a UC Berkeley graduate student who helped lead the study. 'If users don't want to be tracked and there is a problem with tracking, then we should regulate tracking, not regulate cookies,' Soltani said."

14 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Re:All i can say is by auric_dude · · Score: 5, Informative

    All I can say is BetterPrivacy via https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623

  2. Re:Piece of cake... by dc29A · · Score: 3, Informative

    Or on Windows, go to 'Document and Settings' (Users on Vista/7 if I am not mistaken), 'Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player'.

    Remove '#SharedObjects' folder, create a file with same name on it. Remove all security rights on it. Do same with 'macromedia.com' folder.

    Problem solved. To test it, go to Youtube, set your volume to a certain level. Close browser, re-open and see if Youtube maintained the volume level. It shouldn't.

  3. Flash Website Storage Settings by wile_e8 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Go here to see all the flash cookies and delete any and all you don't want. Might not be as easy as deleting a directory, but I don't necessarily want to delete them all.

    1. Re:Flash Website Storage Settings by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      This content requires Flash

      Download the free Flash Player now!

  4. Good browsers let the user choose by gurps_npc · · Score: 3, Informative

    In Firefox, the "Better Privacy" addon deletes flash cookies. Any browser that doesn't offer that kind of control is not worth getting. In my opinion, Firefox without "TACO" (auto creates a bunch of "opt out" cookies without any identifing details), "Better Privacy" (removes flash cookies)and "NoScript" (prevents unwanted scripts - including site-jacking stuff), is not fully installed.

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  5. Re:All i can say is by Dogers · · Score: 4, Informative

    And a way to view what you currently have..
    http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html

    --
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  6. /dev/null by dtschmitz · · Score: 3, Informative

    What I do: #remove the existing macromedia directory and set a link to /dev/null
    $cd && rm -rf .macromedia && ln -s /dev/null .macromedia
    Be Safe!

    Dietrich T. Schmitz & Associates
    Cloud Computing Services

  7. Re:Piece of cake... by mad_robot · · Score: 2, Informative

    Doesn't Adobe's Flash settings widget work in Linux? It seems a bit drastic disabling Flash cookies for the whole internet when you can set preferences individually for each website you visit.

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  8. Re:All i can say is by trifish · · Score: 2, Informative

    Isn't this a way to permanently disable Flash cookies?

    http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html

    Note that this isn't just documentation. If you have Flash installed, the first what looks like a screenshot is actually the Flash config panel.

    Adobe could improve it by adding "Clear all cookies on exit".

  9. Re:Yet another reason for flashblock by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Use Flashblock and NoScript. When you allow scripts on the page, then Flashblock fires up and puts in the place holders.

  10. Re:All i can say is by florescent_beige · · Score: 3, Informative

    I just started using bp last week and here is something important. The version on the Firefox addon site is not the latest. I got 1.41 at

    http://netticat.ath.cx/BetterPrivacy/BetterPrivacy.htm

    because it added a bit of functionality. Specifically in the way it treats DOM storage.

    DOM storage is not flash cookies (LSOs), it is a separate way sites can store data on your computer I had not heard about. The old version could only disable DS, but now BP can now treat DS like LSOs so it stays on but the data gets deleted on FF shutdown. Some sites like cnn video need DS turned on.

    Also I set it to delete the default LSO. That one stores a list of every flash site you visit. Even if you turn Flash local storage completely off using:

    http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html

    you will see a list of visited sites on the last tab on that control. Deleting the default cookie gets rid of that list.

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    Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
  11. Re:All i can say is by NettiCat · · Score: 4, Informative

    The version on the Firefox addon site is not the latest.

    I wish the AMO folks would update BetterPrivacy to the latest version but I cannot do anything to accelerate that procedure. Thanks for your important note, I found it accidently while searching for related websites. NettiCat (author of BetterPrivacy, http://netticat.ath.cx/

  12. Re:Piece of cake... by elashish14 · · Score: 2, Informative

    BAD solution! Some sites will break if you do this and you won't be able to watch videos.

    There are many better solutions. Using an init or crond script is one to remove the directory regularly. Another is to mount ~/.macromedia to /tmp or a ramdisk which is what I do. Those cookies never even get to smell my hard drive and it's not like I'm doing anything better with the RAM.

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  13. Re:Adobe needs a new CEO. by muckracer · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually found one:

    Bleachbit - http://bleachbit-project.appspot.com/

    Open-Source and for Linux and Windows.

    Still would love to find a command-line version of something like it to run on shutdown and/or from cron.