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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."

7 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Perhaps we should surveil the surveyors... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Spread across a reasonable number of annoyed individuals, paying to have a private investigator tail high level officers and major shareholders of advertising corporations that engage in this sort of thing 24/7/365 would be fairly inexpensive and amusing.

    1. Re:Perhaps we should surveil the surveyors... by johanatan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I tend to think that it will come to that. In the near future, I expect everyone to record everything. The only question left for courts to decide will be the legitimacy of the material (i.e., whether it is authentic or counterfeit).

  2. 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

  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.

  4. 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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  5. Re:Piece of cake... by jo42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    An even better solution is on Adobe's own web site: How to uninstall the Adobe Flash Player plug-in and ActiveX control

  6. 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/