Flash Cookies - You wont believe how many are on your hard drive.

[Mark Grant]

Flash Cookies

Most computer users dont know what a flash cookie is.

They are cookies that are used to track and store information about youre web browsing.

They have been around for a few years but rarely get mentioned.

A flash cookie can be up to 100kb in size, a normal browser cookie is only 4kb.

Most experienced computer users will use free applications such as ccleaner http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner to clean their PC, but this does not clean the flash cookies.

The only way I have found to access them easily is to use the online tool at macromedia.com

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html#117717

This opens a control panel, scroll down the list of cookies, if the computer is a few years old there may be hundreds or thousands of them.

My PC that is only a year old had hundreds of flash cookies, many of the site names I had never visited, shows how much stuff gets planted by flash banner adverts etc..

You can delete them from the control panel.- ' delete all sites'

If you disable flash cookies some sites might not work, so maybe clearing them occasionally is the way to go.

That's my free tip of the day

How long was the list on your PC ?

 

[Alastair Cummins]

So this would be why there is suddenly Jessops adverts advertising Nikon cameras on loads of the sites I use after I was looking the other week?

 

[Hamish Gill]

the internet is out to get us all ...
to be fair ... if im going to be advertised to id rather get targeted advertising ...

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Apple are incorporating tech into their Safari browser to allow users to kill this tracking of your browsing completely

Can't happen soon enough IMHO

In safari currently you can go to PREFERENCES/SECURITY and click on the SHOW COOKIES button

You can then view/edit/delete from there

 

[Mark Grant]

That's good to know about safari, although I just installed it and it only shows the normal browser cookies, not the flash cookies. ( tested on my windows 7 PC)

There are two types of cookie (three if count chocolate cookies )

 

[Paul Lange]

I use a browser called Dragon by Comodo, it's free and a refinement of Google's Chrome. On the control panel to delete cookies, history, cache etc it also gives you the option to delete the flash cookies too. I've found thats its a very stable browser, probably the best I've ever used. It did take me a while to get used to the ergonomics of it but this was probably too much conditioning by Netscape and Internet Explorer to be fair.