The Other Spies In Your Browser
All those Flashy ads are collecting more than impressions. They are garnering information about you, to be sliced and diced and rented to anyone. Here’s how to stop them in their tracks.
Regular browser cookies can be easily and quickly disabled for all web sites you visit, but this blanket protection cannot be done for the Flash based ads and eye candy that more web sites are adding to their real estate. These Flashes are often provided to web sites for free, but there’s still no free lunch and you, or information about you, is the price you pay to see this stuff.
These Flashy spies can be much larger than regular cookies, and can stay in your computer system forever. Called shared objects, they cannot be gotten rid of, but you can stop their information gathering, which has to be done for each Flashy ad on each web site, using the Flash settings using the following procedure.
- Right click at each Flash ad, which opens a context sensitive menu. One of the menu items, usually the last one, will have a caption like About Flash Player…; another menu item will have a Settings caption.
- Click on the Settings menu item, which opens a tabbed control group, wit one of the tabs named LocalStorage.
- Click on the LocalStorage tab, and set the size slider to None, usually the leftmost position. Then click the Close button.
This will block information written to the Flash shared object for this selected web site and domain, and will stay in effect until you change it using this procedure.
© Copyright 2010 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG
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Tags: cookies, Flash, personal information security, shared objects, sponsored ads