Interesting Facts About Flash Cookies
You may know that JavaScript Cookies exist and they hold bits of information about a browser session for a site that you visit regularly. These cookies eventually expire and are pretty innocuous. On the other hand, Flash has its own kind of cookie, although it's not called that, but exists for similar purposes.
According to this article at MACNN, Flash cookies could pose some privacy issues because they are not as easy to delete via the browser. Flash cookies are larger than JavaScript cookies (100Kb as opposed to 4kb).
I can already see Microsoft saying I told you so. There's probably a similar mechanism in SilverLight, but I can't confirm.
A majority of the time, these Flash cookies aren't storing or retrieving sensitive information, but who knows. I'm sure Adobe is all over this. What do you think?
Labels: Flash
posted by alemieux3 @ 1:51 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Love the blog design! :)
Flash cookies are "sandboxed," that is, they can only be accessed by the site that initiated the cookie. So, if you provided a site with sensitive information through a flash interface, the developer *could* choose to save that info in a local shared object (aka flash cookie). But that info could not be accessed by scripts or SWFs hosted on any other domains.
Now, that being said, I'm not sure if that information is human readable in a file on your computer (possible)? So if your computer is stolen, that info, like your bookmarks and saved passwords, could be accessible...
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