Tossing Your Cookies

Every now and then you may wish to use a feature in your browser to check out which of the sites you visit have set cookies on you machine — those tiny morsels of text that get sent back and forth between your browser and the machine serving up web pages so that your site-specific preferences are known and respected. They are by and large benign, but, given that they track some of your progress through the web, they can be used to inform advertisers of your interests. And, because cookies can carry personal information, they represent a privacy risk, especially if “stolen” by the bad guys. Your browser gives you the ability not simply to view cookies, but to eliminate those already set and to block them in the future.

This is old news. New to me, however, are Flash cookies. According to an article in Wired (“You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again“), these data aren’t stored where your HTML cookies are and so aren’t visible or capable of being managed by your browser’s functionality. You may toss your cookies but… you haven’t.

As the name implies, Flash cookies depend upon the nearly ubiquitous Adobe Flash browser plug-in, which, in addition to side-stepping your ordinary browser cookie management allows servers to store up to 25 times the data that an HTML cookie can store.

Most Flash cookies may be used for exactly the same helpful purposes as regular cookies. Some, however, work to automatically re-install a browser cookie if you delete it; others report on your browser use for the benefit of advertisers.

According to the Wired piece, although Adobe offers a way on their website to remove these Flash cookies, the user interface is so confusing as to be impossible. The Wired article also contains links to applications you can use to eliminate Flash cookies from your machine, and instructions on how to find them on your computer.

I downloaded the Mac application, used it, and deleted 402 Flash cookies that I hadn’t known were there. A day later 9 more had appeared simply as a result of my normal browsing activity. One of these was from clearspring.com, a company that tracks the use of web content for the purpose of “monetization,” another two were from howcast.com, a site that distributes “how to” videos (which I’d not visited), one was from Gmail, another was from Twitter, and yet another was apparently a “YouTube helper.”

I’ve learned to live with cookies, though perhaps I shouldn’t be so sanguine. (Perhaps, too, it would be worthwhile to see if PIPEDA has any relevance to cookies of whatever flavour.) And I suppose I’ll learn to live with Flash cookies, as well. But I do resent the sneakiness that their use represents. And I wonder, of course, about what other hidden gems come along with my use of the internet.