Adobe's "cookie abuse"

Adobe has finally acknowledged it's cookie abuse after FTC made reports about Adobe's flash player cookies, or what they call LSO(Local Shared Objects). And also there have been many law suits against flash player.

Adobe flash which is used in about 98%  of  the pc's in the world, does not allow to delete its LSO, even if users manually try to do it. Flash however has argued till now that LSO is not for tracking purposes. LSO allows other websites( not adobe itself) to track user behaviour, thus violating their privacy.

Blogger Emmy Huang addressed the issue in an update on Adobe's Flash blog, saying the company was "collaborating with browser vendors to integrate LSO management with the browser UI," giving users an easier and locally-based way to clear LSOs of third-party information and prevent re occurrence. An API called NPAPI ClearSiteData has already been approved for implementation in Firefox, and will be added to Chrome as well. Additionally, Huang promised that a system preference setting for Windows, Mac and Linux would give users local control over LSO management (including turning it off entirely) rather than the present Shockwave-based web panel control that few web users are aware of.

No timeline matters were discussed by Huang. And only mozilla and chrome were named as partners in this program. However Apple and Microsoft(among others) are expected to join.Safari browsers running in Private Browsing Mode and using Flash 10.1 or higher already have the ability to clear LSOs, but most users do not implement Private Browsing as it is impractical for routine internet usage.

Lawsuits involving the misuse of LSOs have been filed against Clearsprint, Quantcast, the Walt Disney Company (Internet Group), Warner Brothers Records and Specific Media among others over the last year and a half for misusing LSOs to restore the ability to track customers who deliberately deleted "regular" cookies in order to protect their privacy. Researchers at the University of California Berkeley discovered last August that 50 percent of the websites they sampled were using LSOs to track users.

Adobe has always condemned the misuse of LSOs by third parties, but critics have argued that they themselves opened the door to abuse by making LSOs some 25 times bigger in file size than traditional web cookies. Though the company has previously said it "won't stand" for abuses, this is the first time the company has documented any concrete steps towards making LSO management easier and more obvious to users.