Ever wanted to delete all the tracking cookies that your browser collects? Most browsers provide ways to do that for ordinary cookies, but did nothing for the Flash cookies. Adobe seems to have heard the demands to fix this:
Adobe has finally fixed a privacy weakness that threatened users of its ubiquitous Flash Player: the software’s storing of cookie-like files that many websites used to track visitors’ behavior against their wishes.
So-called LSOs, or local shared objects, are useful for storing user preferences, such as the preferred sound volume when visiting YouTube, but the Flash feature comes with a dark side. Unscrupulous websites can use them to restore tracking cookies even after a user deliberately deletes them. Files that do this have come to be known as Flash cookies.
Now, developers at Adobe have worked with their counterparts at Mozilla and Google on a programming interface that allows LSOs to be deleted from within the settings panel of compliant browsers. The API, known as NPAPI ClearSiteData, has already been approved for implementation in Firefox. It will soon appear on the Google Chrome dev channel.
