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Flash Cookies! ...and what they do.
The issue with Flash-Cookies is not whether they be good or bad - for the most part they're a helpful tool - but the fact that many companies are using them semi-clandestinely, knowing that most users have no clue that "flash-cookies" exist and persist on their computers.
To check how many Flash-cookies are on your computer – and there's probably a lot – go to Macromedia Settings Manager and scroll through the list.
To control Flash-Cookies get the BetterPrivacy Plug-in for Firefox, or, if you're not using Firefox, use Adobe's Macromedia Settings Manager.
Original Report at: Social Science Research Network
So you think you cleared the Cookie cache on your browser? They're not tracking you? Think again! The insidious tracking of web users' activities reaches new levels of sophistication every year. The current favorite of some of the web-giants is the Flash-cookie. Modern browsers come equipped with privacy controls to protect users from the prying eyes of commercial and institutional interests. Yet, every time software vendors implement new security and privacy features, web companies find newer, more sophisticated ways of circumventing those protections. To wit - Flash-Cookies.
A quote from Ryan Singel's report on WIRED.com's Epicenter:
Flash cookies are one of the slightly less known methods used to track unwary users and record their information.
More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in 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.
source: WIRED.com - Epicenter
To advertising companies, one of the most attractive features of flash-cookies is that most users are unaware of their existence. These types of tracking devices are immune to the usual privacy controls in your web-browser, and in some cases negate the browser's privacy measures by re-spawning cookies after the user has deleted them from the browser's cache.
The UC Berkeley research report shines a bit of a light on the issue of web-governance and regulation. Generally, because of its "open" nature, there's an assumption of "governance", when really no controls or regulations are in place.
Governments and regulators are playing an ongoing game of catch-up against partisan groups whose only real affiliations and motivations are internet-profits.
The concern is not so much the existence of the technology, since, as with most such goodies, they are used to improve our "user experience". In most cases, the cookies are used to help deliver flash technology — like making it possible to have seamless streaming video, or controlling the volume of your flash-player — The concern is their unregulated and/or unscrupulous use to track and record users activities while by-passing normal privacy controls.
The WIRED.com article goes into detail about the use of the flash-cookies — well worth a quick look.
In closing, I'll quote one more paragraph from Ryan Singel's article.
Defenders of behavioral ads say that privacy shouldn’t be a concern since cookies really identify a browser, not a person. Moreover, they argue that users would prefer to have relevant ads. Targeted Behavioral Ads could also help save online journalism.
Read the full story at WIRED magazine's Epicenter...
One of the more obvious uses of cookie technology is targeted behavioral/contextual advertising — The ability to predict user behaviour and target advertising to maximize its relevancy according to the viewers known habits and patterns.
If, as proponents of the technology suggest, privacy is such a non-issue, why have privacy controls at all? ...and what the hell do you mean "save online journalism"?
Most of the cookies in question will never do anything other than improve your experience on the web, but it's probably a good idea to keep an eye on what's being stored on your computer and by whom. – Adobe's Settings manager offers the ability to specify who can store session information, and how much of it.
When I checked my cache through the Settings Manager, almost 30 cookies were shown – most of them from sites I've never even heard of!! – They can be removed individually or all at once.
On a similar note, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has recently made an online application available, Panopticlick that shows what kind of information is visible as you surf the web.
Below is a screenshot of the Adobe Settings Manager, showing the 5 user-selectable panels available to control various cookie settings and permissions.
Adobe Settings Manager Screenshot
Some Solutions/Resources:
- BetterPrivacy – Firfox/Mozilla plugin
- ixquick.com - The ixquick Search Engine
- Flush – for Mac
- Adobe's Setting Manager
- ghacks.net – article
- I'm a Super.com article
Of the resources and tools mentioned in the list, the BetterPrivacy add-on for Firefox seems to be the most effective.
Adobe's Settings Manager also seems to remove the cookies effectively, but you should keep in mind that Adobe Flash is proprietary software, and as such is distributed in unreadable binary form. This makes it very difficult to evaluate what that software is actually doing. – Mozilla warns its users to install only software from sites they, (the user), trusts. — Sage advise!! — I tried to locate the source code for BetterPrivacy, and could only find a notice saying that BetterPrivacy is shareware, so I'm not sure if the source of BetterPrivacy is available for public perusal or not. (Shareware used-to be the source of the majority of computer viruses and trojans etc., and, like Adobe's binary, the absense of inspectable source-code is a sticky point for proponents and users of free, (open), software.