An academic study has found that over half of the top 100
websites are retaining user information through Flash cookies
without permission.
The study, by researchers at the University of California in
Berkeley, will be of particular concern to those who try to delete
cookies as a means of keeping their internet browsing patterns
private. Flash cookies differ from the HTTP cookies which users are
able to delete on request, in that they remain largely undetected
by privacy settings on software such as Internet Explorer and
Firefox.
Flash cookies, many of which are capable of tracking user
activity, originate from coding contained in Adobe's Flash
media player. In several cases where researchers attempted to
delete or block HTTP cookies on Flash-enabled sites, the Flash
cookies continued to trace user data and even
"re-spawned" the deleted information upon the next visit
to the site. Only four of the 100 sites mentioned the use of the
Flash technology for tracking
