[lotuseclat79]

Adobe Flash Cookies Raising Privacy Questions Again.

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.

-- Tom

[TOGG]

An issue of the Windows Secrets Newsletter drew my attention to the potential problems caused by the behaviour of Flash in allowing sites to store cookies up to 100KB in size and then permitting third parties to access that information.

The antidote suggested was the Adobe Settings Manager (which you can only access online!); http://www.macromedia.com/support/do...manager06.html If it works as advertised, the settings allow you to prevent information being stored (or to delete what is already stored), plus you can prevent sites from trying to access your microphone or camera.

[lotuseclat79]

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again.

More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plugin to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.

-- Tom

[perfume]

Dear Tom,
That's where me thinks FF scores over other browsers, esp. IE! It has an Add-on, which deletes these"SUPER-COOKIES" OR FLASH COOKIES"using an add-on--->Betterprivacy! If the claim of the Add-on is correct, every time one closes the FF browser, these Flash cookies are automatically deleted and also the folders where these flashes are stored are also deleted(options)!