Flash Cookies – Hidden Tracking
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