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For those of you that don’t like to be tracked by browser cookies when you are traveling around the Internet – you should know that browser privacy settings or most Cookie cleaners are not finding these little hidden files.

Adobe has built in their own tracking cookies into Flash that can store information about what sites or movies you are viewing.  These are not blocked by your privacy settings in the web browswer, or even removed by most privacy / antivirus software.  Vipre by Sunbelt Software is starting a beta to start cleaning these files as well.

That doesn’t bother me as much as what they are doing with these limited flash cookies.  Flash cookies themselves aren’t as valuable to marketers or website owners as a browser cookie.  A study by University of California showed that websites are using these flash cookies to give you a unique marker, so when the website cookies are deleted, when you revisit the website it will use this unique flash cookie to respawn the original cookies that you have deleted.  The study stated that more than 50% are using flash cookies to store information about their users.

If you would like to remove these cookies manually as found on a Wired article:

Where to find these flash cookies:
* Windows: LSO files are stored typically with a “.SOL” extension, within each user’s Application Data directory, under Macromedia\FlashPlayer\#SharedObjects.
* Mac OS X: For Web sites, ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/FlashPlayer. For AIR Applications, ~/Library/Preferences/[package name (ID)of your app] and ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/FlashPlayer/macromedia.com/Support/flashplayer/sys
* GNU-Linux: ~/.macromedia

Brent TechNews Flash, Privacy, TechHints

When Google gobbled up DoubleClick I thought this was just another move of moving money around getting more space on the web.  I have always been impressed on Google’s vision (other than the space program, but even that I’m probably missing) and this is no different.  Being able to step up the offering in the online advertising from just AdWords was genius.  On top of that, they made text ads generated from their AdWords people are already using.

I’ve used AdSense on a few other projects and always liked the ease and fair revenue it had brought in.  The first time I saw the ads, I was impressed.  It actually looks at the page you are viewing to decide what ad to present to you.  Not the subject of the whole site, much like ad companies in the past had done.

Google is starting to take it a bit farther by actually using all of that history they are so good at tracking to present an ad of what this person’s likes are even if it isn’t the subject of the page the vistor is actually viewing.  Here is a snip from the email that was sent out:

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category.

 

In this email, Google advises their publishers that this change in their system would also probably change the privacy policy of most sites, so they offered this help for Edits to your Privacy Policy.  As an advertiser wanting to reach as many targeted eyes as possible, and as a web publisher I want to have my vistors have ads they want to click on, but this is starting to scare me a bit about the privacy of your viewing.  I think today with users posting their every move on twitter and talking about every part of their lives in blogs, I think most Internet users won’t care, but I think it’s giving Google even more information about our surfing habbits when we aren’t even searching on Google.  I am not going to even get into Google’s Analytics harvesting in this post. 

So, I am very torn between getting good information that “I” will want verses what others would want.  However, that is a lot of information for one company to possess.  I guess, it would be a lot like the cell phone tapping in The Dark Knight - it did help them find the joker, but they also destroyed the system after that one use.  I don’t want Google to destroy themselves – I use them too much.

Brent Google, TechNews AdSense, Google, Privacy