Photo by esti.

Web Cookies

Many people have heard about the privacy issues concerning websites tracking you online through the use of ordinary cookies. These are small text files that when used legitimately within your browser can help a website identify you so you don’t have to log in every time. Unfortunately advertisers and marketers also gather this information and make money by tracking and profiling people like yourself online. Many people including me see this as an invasion of privacy and use software to avoid these unwanted cookies. There are lots of software that will manage or delete cookies and I use CS Lite within Firefox to control cookie permissions for myself. I also use CCleaner to delete my browser history after surfing – to purge any cookies I have let through with CS Lite.

Flash Cookies

Local Shared Objects or Flash Cookies are slightly different. They are used by websites to track things related to flash, for example your recent movies you’ve looked at on youtube or how far you’ve got in a flash game. LSO’s are stored in your browser and do not get deleted when you clear your browsing history. CCleaner can delete them if you select the cleaning checkbox for flash player. Luckily website A cannot share a flash cookie with website B, websites can only track you on one domain at a time therefore unlike normal http / web cookies.

Better Privacy

If you use the Firefox web browser (and if not why not?) then you can install an extension called Better Privacy. This will delete any LSO’s or flash cookies when you exit Firefox. From the developer -

Flash-cookies (Local Shared Objects, LSO) are pieces of information placed on your computer by a Flash plugin. Those Super-Cookies are placed in central system folders and so protected from deletion. They are frequently used like standard browser cookies. Although their thread potential is much higher as of conventional cookies, only few users began to take notice of them. It is of frequent occurrence that -after a time- hundreds of those Flash-cookies reside in special folders. And they won’t be deleted – never!

BetterPrivacy can stop them, e.g. by allowing to silently remove those objects on every browser exit. So this extension becomes sort of “install and forget add-on”.

Please let me know of anything you use to help surf privately in the comments.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Related posts:

1. Chrome Security Extensions Where Are They?
2. Flash Cookie Cleaning Nom Nom Nom
3. Privacy Online- Are You Concerned?
4. Flash Cookies Are Not Mentioned in Privacy Policies From Many Big Websites
5. Firefox Add Ons Collection by Jonnysblog