Tech Gringo

Flash Cookies: Hidden Menace?

I am very concerned about privacy online. If I am using my computer at home, I dutifully clean out my cache from time to time and clean out my cookies on a regular basis. If I am using a computer at an internet cafe, I will do it when I first start using the computer and once again when I am completely finished. Just to be sure, I’ll even shut down the browser. I am so concerned about online privacy that I use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.

I thought that I was taking proper precautions, but I thought wrong. I never knew that Flash, the browser plugin that powers many web applications, stores cookies of its own. I never even gave it a thought, but when I decided to check out my Flash settings, boy did I get a surprise. Dozens of websites that I have visited since I built this computer had stored flash cookies within the flash application folder. That means that those websites could track my visits to them on a regular basis. I find that just freaky. These aren’t the cookies you can delete inside your privacy settings in your browser, these are separate.

If you are like me, you don’t like having cookies that stay forever on your computer. While Adobe Flash doesn’t advertise that Flash stores cookies and they don’t make it well known how to change your Flash settings, it is relatively easy to clean out Flash cookies.

Here’s how you do it:

Visit http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html. This is where you can adjust many Flash settings, but we are interested primarily in the Flash cookies.

On this page, you’ll see something that looks like this:

Scroll through the list and you can see the literally dozens of sites that put these Flash cookies on your hard drive. Sites like Google Adwords, Youtube and Paypal are there along with sites you might never remember visiting. Freaky, isn’t it?

Now it’s time to delete these cookies. This is the easiest part, just click on the button that says Delete all sites and the cookies vanish and your computer is once again clean.