Flash Cookies

Some people do not realize that Adobe’s Flash player actually includes cookies or site information outside of the normal cookies stored within a browser.  Last week I was playing around and decided to see if I could block these cookies within Flash and determine if they were required.  So I went to the Flash Manager on Adobe’s site and configured my local player using some recommendations I found on another site:

The recommendations included removing the check mark to allow third-party content.  I then went looking for Flash videos.  I did not appear to have any problems on YouTube, but did find some issues on other sites.

Even if you clear out the local Flash cookies via the online tool, a list of sites is still “left behind” on the local system.  Below is the path on my Vista machine:

For example, I accessed a Symantec link this morning.  I cleared out my Flash cookies, but a folder is still present under the path above:

Notice the time stamp on the everyclickmatters.com folder.  So at least on my machine, these folders remained even after I cleared all Flash cookies.

On a site note, a Firefox plug-in is available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623 called Better Privacy that can block and manage Flash cookies locally.