Posted on 09/11/2011 9:21:48 AM PDT by Texas Fossil
Flash cookies are a new way of tracing your movement and storing a lot more information about you than with normal cookies. One major disadvantage of flash cookies is that you can’t locate them in your browser. They are not shown in the list of cookies that you can see when you take a look at the cookies that are currently saved in your web browser. Normal HTTP cookies can’t save more than 4 Kilobyte of data while Flash cookies can save up to 100 Kilobyte. If you want to try out how they work you could do the following.
Go to Youtube, increase or decrease the volume of the videos and delete all cookies afterwards. You will notice that the volume level is still at the same level when you close your browser and open it again. This is done with so called Local Shared Objects, better known as Flash cookies. The main question is of course how a computer can be checked for Flash cookies and how it would be possible to delete those cookies again.
This is actually a very tricky thing. I was searching for a way to check them on my computer but could not find it. After reading some information on the Adobe Flash Player website I was able to realize that the only possibility to check them was to open a page on the Adobe site which would show them.
The so called Settings Manager can be accessed from the Adobe website but is running locally on your computer. The Website Storage Settings display all Flash cookies that are currently saved on your computer. You can delete flash cookies from individual sites or all at once. It is also possible to increase or decrease the Kilobyte size of all information that are stored on your computer.
Adobe does not have access to the settings that you see in the Settings Manager or to personal information on your computer.
No Flash Cookies will be saved if you go into Global Storage Settings and disable the option “Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer”.
47 websites did store Flash cookies on my computer and I decided to delete all of them and disable the feature to be on the safe site. Did you know about Flash cookies ? How many did you find on your pc ?
I have been using a plug-in for Firefox called "BetterPrivacy" that I like. It will easily remove the Flash or LSO cookies.
Yep me too.. I am trying out Chrome since FF turns into such a memory hog, how does it handle flash cookies?
They (along with javascript) are also a way to unmask your IP addy on the Tor network, or anywhere else. Tor button plugin solves this problem however.
If you are a Firefox user, there is a free Add-On called “Ghostery”, works very well in blocking these types of creepy tracking schemes.
“Flash & Silverlight Cookies
Also called locally stored objects or LSOs, these cookies are stored in a different location than your normal browser cookies. If enabled, Ghostery will delete cookies from companies in our library when you close Firefox. “
these are the so-called supercookies
I use windows explorer. Thanks for posting.
ping
Are these the cookies that show an ad for a web site that I have visited, while looking at another site? If so, it’s pretty creepy. Is there a way to defeat this if using IE? Thanks.
Alright, I have a totally irrelevant story for this thread.
Last week my mother and a couple of her sisters visited my very old grandmother. While there, they decided to help her by cleaning her house.
The woman saves every single piece of mail that she has ever been sent. One of my aunts was trying to sort it and she came across a flyer for a product to remove cookies from your computer.
My grandmother refused to let her throw it away. “What if somebody asks me to make computer cookies for their office party? What if somebody needs the recipe? There are a LOT of people who would love computer cookies!”
After fifteen minutes of trying to explain what computer cookies were, and my grandmother stubbornly refusing to grasp the concept, my aunt patiently allowed her to file the flyer in her recipe box.
This one’s for you......
Thanks for the tip on Ghostery. Just downloaded it to my Firefox browser.
Ping for later review.
hee hee hee
I am using Firefox 5.0 under Xubuntu 11.4
I have had no problems with Firefox on this machine, and like the plug-in which removes the LSO cookies after each session.
Now that I’ve got Ghostery up and running on my FF browser, I keep seeing an alert for Google Analytics while perusing FR. I don’t know enough about Google Analytics to choose whether to block it or not. Your thoughts?
TNX
ping
I am not sure about what to do with IE. I simply don’t use it.
This machine has an Xubuntu 11.4 OS.
You can always install Firefox and the “BetterPrivacy” plug-in. And not use IE.
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