Are Flash Cookies Tracking Your Online Activities?

Tracking Cookies have a questionable reputation and use throughout the Internet, and with their tip-toeing around the issue of privacy management, it's no wonder Flash cookies are a great mystery to many computer users.

Currently it would seem new light has dawned on the matter of cookies in Adobe's Flash, according to a paper by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

The trouble seems to have started with a large number of users deleting their browser HTTP cookies periodically, which makes it difficult for mostly commerce sites to track the number of unique visitors accurately. Flash cookies have been a solution that fills in the missing link for sites suffering from this loss of data.

Flash cookies are a lot similar to regular HTTP cookies as then can locally store similar information allowing a website to track certain information about its visitors. In some cases the information stored can be as simple as a unique ID or data shared among different web browser platforms. One of the advantages of a Flash cookie is that they can be larger, have no expiration date and be shared via different web browsers within the same computer.

Unfortunately, this is where many people begin to show some concern, as the Flash cookies can be used to track users in ways that may not be entirely appreciated, or even known about. A much larger cookie file, one may think, leaves room for malicious code to hide. Though a valid thought, this has not been proven to be true as of yet. It has been found that some of the top 100 web sites utilize Flash cookies in a manor to repopulate HTTP cookies that a computer user may have deleted in clearing out their cache. We may see more Flash cookies used in this manor in the future.

If this news has you a little concerned, don't panic. There are ways you can control cookies in Flash. If you delete your cookies, then I am sure you had a valid reason for doing so. More than likely you do not delete them just for the fun of it but rather to avoid a specific website from accessing the cookie again and not repopulating it via a Flash cookie. If you wish to control cookies in Flash, then you can simply right-click the flash object and then select Settings > Folder tab. After that, you can set Flash to not store local content.

Does the idea of a Flash cookie scare you? Do you think we will see many computer infections spawn from Flash cookies in the near future?