questions → do you understand flash cookies?

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Do you understand flash cookies?

This was prompted by a newsletter. The subject has been mentioned by @shrdlu several times. She really dislikes them.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/you-deleted-your-cookies-think-again/
http://billmullins.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/lso-flash-cookies-a-serious-attack-on-your-privacy/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Shared_Object
Adobe's explanation: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/articles/lso/
Adobe's controls page: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager02.html Note that there are several tabs on the Global Privacy Settings panel. You can view who set flash cookies on your system. You can set controls for any and all flash cookies from this panel. I dislike having to set controls remotely.
For Firefox you can turn them off by Better Privacy: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623/

by bsalusa
asked 2 years ago

4 Answers answer

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vote-for3vote-against

I can only say that my eyes about poppped out when I saw the number of them on my machine after installing Better Privacy as a Firefox add-on.

Those are some sneaky bastages, keeping track of people surreptitiously that way.

afurball
2 years ago

vote-for3vote-against

@bsalusa: You are right, and I really HATE them. I seldom browse the web with flash enabled browsers. I recently moved from Mozilla to Firefox+Thunderbird, and was careful to make sure that neither of those had flash capability. On rare occasion, if I already know the content and the person, I'll look at youtube from IE7. Other than that, I avoid flash like the ugly useless plague that it is.

Thanks for the link by the way; I used it to clean out residue from my local IE.

shrdlu
2 years ago

vote-for2vote-against

This is interesting: http://www.zdnet.com/news/disney-others-sued-over-allegedly-spying-with-flash-cookies/456629?tag=nl.e550

hobbit
2 years ago

vote-for2vote-against

@hobbit: Because Disney is being sued, many more people will become aware of flash cookies. It is too bad that they won't have the links that I provided in this thread. I tried to keep it simple.

This is the google search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=&as_epq=flash+cookies&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=100&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images

bsalusa
2 years ago

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