{"id":463,"date":"2009-08-11T09:44:14","date_gmt":"2009-08-11T13:44:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=463"},"modified":"2009-08-11T09:44:14","modified_gmt":"2009-08-11T13:44:14","slug":"deleting-your-cookies-doesnt-protect-your-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/08\/11\/deleting-your-cookies-doesnt-protect-your-privacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Deleting your cookies doesn’t protect your privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to a report in Wired<\/em><\/a>, there are lots of sites out there (including whitehouse.gov) who are actively circumventing the common practice and zombifying the cookies you thought you’d deleted:<\/p>\n

\n

More than half of the internet\u2019s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe\u2019s Flash plugin to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.<\/p>\n

Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer of tracking objects, they most likely have not.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s even sneakier?<\/p>\n

Several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called \u2018re-spawning\u2019 in homage to video games where zombies come back to life even after being \u201ckilled,\u201d the report found. So even if a user gets rid of a website\u2019s tracking cookie, that cookie\u2019s unique ID will be assigned back to a new cookie again using the Flash data as the \u201cbackup.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This would be a good opportunity for Adobe (who control the Flash cookie capability) and the browser developers to get together and provide end users with enhanced capability to turn off these zombies. Probably a tiny percentage of current users ever bother to delete cookies, so it’s not like this would seriously undermine legitimate uses of cookies, but it would put a bit more control of how personal information is used back in the hands of the individual.<\/p>\n

Of course, back here in the real world, I don’t honestly expect any such thing, but regulation is almost always the wrong answer to a given problem on the internet. But that’s what we’re likely to get . . . <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to a report in Wired, there are lots of sites out there (including whitehouse.gov) who are actively circumventing the common practice and zombifying the cookies you thought you’d deleted: More than half of the internet\u2019s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe\u2019s Flash plugin to track users and store information about them, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[58,154],"class_list":["post-463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-internet","tag-privacy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":465,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions\/465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}