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Adobe Rolls Out Privacy Controls In Flash Player 10.3
adeelarshad82 writes "Adobe has released Flash Player 10.3, which includes enhanced privacy controls for how your activity is tracked online. Users can now clear local storage — sometimes known as 'Flash cookies' — on versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. Flash cookies, or local shared objects, made headlines last year when the Federal Trade Commission released a report that called on browser makers to include a 'do not track' option in their products. The FTC also mentioned Adobe because it said the cookies gathered by Flash are collected regardless of the browser's settings."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Pretty sure there are loads of greasemonkey scripts that make it an embed movie.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50771
Like this one.
I first knew Flash was evil when there were no such controls in the first version ever released.
How much more acceptance would there be of this product if they had just built in some level
of end-user control from the beginning? Cookie clearing, Don't play till I say, No sound till I say,
Continuous loops controls, etc, etc.
Instead they thru all their weight at supporting punch-the-monkey advertisers and to hell with
the users.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
All I want is a button that will set flash content to load only with approval. This is already done third party, but if Adobe did it one might think Flash was more than just a method to push near pornographic advertising onto innocent users. As it is, the infrastructure to approve cookies is horribly unreliable.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You do not, control, your privacy..
William Shatner, is that you?
I'm almost as paranoid about online privacy, but I will take these small victories when I can.
Or, you don't install it.
Personally, I've hated Flash for almost a decade and don't install it if I can avoid it ... usually my work machines end up needing it for some 3rd party site they force us to use. But, I don't make a habit of having it enabled.
I'm not sure I can name one instance where I found Flash to be useful or something I'd want. Although, who knows, maybe I'm missing out on something really cool ... but my experience with Flash has primarily been about having half a dozen ads on screen that are all in motion.
Well, that and the fact that it's been a gaping security hole since forever.
I agree... Besides, Flash is just like using JavaScript (well... ActionScript) to animate a bunch of graphics primitives or to stream a video. These are things that browsers can do without Flash -- I mean, HTML5 gives you almost all the same featu r e s --- HEY! Shit! We've been dupped into letting the browser makers create their own integrated version of Flash!
Oh, never mind -- It's all OK, it will be codified as a web standard...Just like the current HTML4.01 is -- What could possibly go wrong?
Which made them an obscure company that only the most hardcore geeks have ever heard of, producing software that no one uses.
That would have been more ideal anyway.
Instead, "users" tend to display the same masochism as the most stereotypical battered spouses. "He didn't mean it, I'll give him benefit of doubt, this time he'll CHANGE, he said he'd change and I know he really means it, all those other times were different, this time it's for real!" No matter how asinine or abusive a company becomes, no matter how insecure their products, no matter how anti-customer their actions, people will keep coming back for more. That's the root cause of the problem; to address anything else is to get distracted by secondary and tertiary effects.
We'll have real privacy and security the moment average people value those things more than they value OOH SHINY! Until then it's difficult to blame the companies for treating them like ignorant sheep when they're so willing to assume that role. Don't get me wrong, the suits who make these decisions are still bastards but they're only responding to a sort of demand. If you're interested in effecting a permanent change you have to get over that and focus your efforts on convincing users to change their priorities and attitudes.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Linux:
FTFY.
Has anyone ever experienced a single ill effect, or even slight inconvenience, from deleting ~/.adobe and ~/.macromedia and replacing both with symlinks to /dev/null?
If not, I wonder how difficult it would be to make those an /etc/skel/ default in major distributions. It should be an easy sell, considering decisions with fewer benefits that cause problems for many more users (such as replacing ALSA with PulseAudio as a default sound system) have become default for several major distros.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I've been running Flash free for several months, except for Flash built in to Chrome. I don't use Chrome as my primary browser, so sites see me as someone without Flash. When I need to access something that requires Flash, I open it in Chrome. If it requires Flash and it won't work in Chrome, I won't use the site.
Interesting side note, most sites that require Flash give me an incorrect message saying:
I don't need to update anything, I don't have Flash installed, and I want it that way. Very few give me a message saying I need to install Flash Player for the site to function (correctly). Note to site developers, STOP designing sites that require Flash to work.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Still no official support for 64-bit platforms. That Nov 2010 release of 'Square' is the only thing that works on my Firefox 4 64-bit build with Snow Leopard.
I have my ~/.adobe and .macromedia folders linked to a ramdisk. Sometimes it's necessary to allow flash cookies for limited time uses. For example, once southparkstudios.com wouldn't load and temporarily enabling flash cookies resolved the problem (my memory is hazy, but I think this happened about a year and a half ago). Since I turn off my computer every night, it's (hopefully) not a big deal if my cookies are only saved for a few hours/days at a time. Likewise, I think it's relatively safe if I set firefox to save cookies only until my browser closes.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Slim quick install versions without crapware at the bottom of page on Adobes site here:
Slim Version
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
No, they've just added an easier way of deleting cookies. Deleting cookies has been available for as long as they've had LSOs as far as I am aware.
Puzzle Daze is now my job