Supercookis Are Back Again, This Time From MSN Hulu !

Remember our "How to remove Adobe Supercookies"? yes you can use that article and more tools to keep you data and browsing history off those greasy hands.
Geemodo: MSN Hulu Using SuperCookies To Track You (How To Remove Included)

Google Chrome Will Let Me Keep My Opt-Outs

Google announced today that it's  Chrome will  let me Keep My Opt-Outs, allowing me to opt out permanently from ad tracking cookies, like Adobe Supercookies (But I wonder if embedded flash on Chrome does it or we have to shut the doors on Adobe ourselves, like described in the preceding link).
The  Keep My Opt-Outs is available as an extension for download in Chrome.
The reason behind the Keep My Opt-Outs is the FTC's interest in protecting US consumers from AD tracking companies, with "Do Not Track" initiative. The Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) formed by a group of advertising companies already let people opt out of personalized tracking for the purposes of personalizing advertisements. There are also many online advertisers and trade associations have also joined a major self-regulatory effort to enforce a uniform privacy icon for ads, as well as opt-out guidelines.
The Google's Keep My Opt-Outs is filling the technical void that exists today to just that, The extension alleviate most of the problems of opting out from these ads and yet allow regular ads to appear.
You can read more at Google Public policy blog.

Stop Adobe SuperCookies (Flash Cookies) Sharing Your Personal Data

It was known for a while that Supercookies were persistent even if you regularly delete the cookies that companies or websites leave on you computer. Supercookies like Adobe's "Local Shared Objects" or Microsoft's "User Data Persistence." Basically the supercookies are harder to remove and harder to see. But if you want to learn a bit more about supercookies, you can have a good look at evercookie, an open sourse program that shows how theses rogue companies leave persistent cookies.
So for the moment I will focus on Adobe Flash Cookies and perhaps return to others later. But you can learn more about these cookeis and clean them up by visiting the links provided, specially, EFF.
Do not forget to run Panopticlick on EFF to see how much information your browser is giving away and I also use breadcrumbs to check what my browser is doing.
Adobe Flash Cookie which is also known as privacy killer, on such supercookies that even go beyond the perimeters of browser. according to EFF;

a kind of cookie maintained by the Adobe Flash plug-in on behalf of Flash applications embedded in web pages.1 These cookie files are stored outside of the browser's control. Web browsers do not directly allow users to view or delete the cookies stored by a Flash application, users are not notified when such cookies are set, and these cookies never expire. Flash cookies can track users in all the ways traditionally HTTP cookies do, and they can be stored or retrieved whenever a user accesses a page containing a Flash application.

 You can read about Adobe Flash cookies in this article, written by developer of Gnash, an alternative open source flash implementation.
According to Berkeley researchers, site operators use adobe flash cookies to respawn a deleted HTTP cookie, because even when you delete cookies, flash cookies continue to be on your computer. Basically flash cookies;

* Stay on your computer for an unlimited amount of time
* Store 100 kb of data by default, with an unlimited max
* Couldn’t be deleted by your browser
* Send previous visit information and history, by default, without your permission

So how you get rid of these cookies or control the behavior of these? well you need to visit adobe site (Bookmark this site until we find a better way to clean up flash Cookies) and change some settings and hope and pray that they do what they promise. The tabs related to "Privacy" just allows you to change camera and microphone settings.

To delete all the Flash Cookies currently being stored on your machine:

1. Go to the Settings Manager
2. Go to the Website storage settings panel
3. Click “Delete all sites”
4. Go to the Peer assisted networking panel
5. Click “Delete all sites”

To prevent websites from storing any more information on your computer:

1. Go to Settings Manager
2. Click the Second Tab from the left (Global Storage Settings)
3. Set the Storage Settings slider to None
4. Uncheck “Allow Third Party Flash Content to store data on your computer

But this is just the beginning.Keep your privacy. Please read "" and visit the related links to educate yourself.


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