Are flash cookies killing our privacy?
When we talk about privacy, the first things that comes to my mind is cookies. Apart from the information a user submits at his/her will, a user also submits a lot of information through cookies unknowingly. To the much debated topic of privacy, laws have been set to enforce “transparency of information” and guidelines have been set for webmasters to inform users what sort of information is being taken from you and how that information will be used, when you visit a website. On the other hand, browsers are being updated frequently to add new features so that users can have a better control over handling cookies stored by websites on their computers.
We are talking about general cookies that store very little amount of information and can be deleted with a few clicks. Also, users can control cookie policies on their computer regarding what can be stored in their machine, and for how long. However, these cookies are not much of a problem. How about if a cookie stored on your computer can do these activities:
- Stay on your computer for unlimited amount of time.
- Store 100 KB of data without your permission.
- Can’t be deleted when you clear your browser cache.
- Send information without your permission.
I know it would be a scary situation if all that happens. In fact, you would be shocked to know that it is happening already, since years. As of now, the cookies we’re so deadly afraid of, can store a maximum of 4 kb of information, are managed by your browser, and by default have reasonable defaults and restrictions. However, this scary type of large cookie that exists on 98% of global computers, across all operating systems, it’s the Adobe Flash Player cookie which is also known as flash cookie.
The Adobe Flash Player maintains proprietary cookies called Local Shared Objects or LSO’s. LSO’s are capable of storing 100 KB of information for an indefinite amount of time by default. When you clear your browser history in Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera on Windows, Linux, or OS X, LSO’s are not cleared from Adobe’s local repository.
In fact, all the information in those cookies will remain indefinitely until they are removed by the issuing website, or by you via a cumbersome and ridiculous process. You can read about removing flash cookies in the article published by Imasuper.com author. Or you can see the removing flash cookies video down there at the end of this article. This article is an extension to the article on the above mentioned link. I’m not sure if this issue was taken into account and if there is any solution to this issue. However, as per my research, Adobe has not yet released any updates to control/block these cookies and when I visited the Adobe flash Settings Manager web page, I was shocked to find over 150 cookies stored. I have changed my settings to not store any cookies at all and I’m finding a little problem at times while browsing. I’m not sure if it is something caused by changing the flash settings manager but at times, a web page does not show up completely, some or the other part does not display correctly. For eg., sometimes a block of advertisement does not show up and when I refresh the page couple of times, the advertisement show up.
However, I can certainly live without looking at those “not so important” advertisements on web pages rather than allowing people to store “large cookies” on my computer and take my private information without my permission. So, have you checked recently how many flash cookies are stored on your computer? Would appreciate if you can share your findings with the community here.
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andy
January 27th, 2010 on 8:15 pm
It is a concept that has been hidden since years. All the big companies like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc., have been using the flash cookies to track visitors and clicks. I believe, Adobe should reduce the default size of these cookies and provide information how a user can disable these flash cookies. Flash cookies sucks and a user should be made aware that these cookies are tracking them without their permission.
Michael.