Adobe is planning to make it easier to deleted Flash cookies by providing new tools within web browsers and in OS X.
Emmy Huang, group product manager for Flash, said in a blog post that while Flash cookies, properly known as local shared objects, are chiefly used to improve the browsing experience, by saving login details or site history for example, there are privacy concerns.
“Since local storage allows sites and apps to remember information, there are concerns about the use of local storage to store tracking information — or of greater concern, to restore tracking information to a browser cookie that a user has intentionally deleted,” she wrote.
Late last year US regulators said that they had raised this issue with Adobe, noting that web browsers’ built-in privacy controls do not affect Flash cookies, which can only be deleted or blocked using the Flash Player Settings Manager on Adobe’s website.
Adobe now plans to rectify this and has been working with Google and Mozilla on a system that will allow Chrome and Firefox users to easily delete local shared objects.
“The first capability, one that we believe will have the greatest immediate impact, is to allow users to clear LSOs (and any local storage, such as that of HTML5 and other plugin technologies) from the browser settings interface — similar to how users can clear their browser cookies today,“ Huang said.
She added that she expects other browser makers, such as Apple and Microsoft, to add this capability “in the near future”.
Adobe is also working on an OS X System Preferences pane that will give Mac users desktop access to the Flash Player Settings Manager.
