Adobe Flash Player has a property which imo is borderline illegal. So do other programs.

Background – websites and apps can (and do) place cookies on your system which are designed to make loading the website faster. They generally expire after a certain amount of time. Ideally, they aren’t supposed to collect info about you, especially if you gave no consent for them to do so (at least in my opinion) because that is a privacy violation. Usually cookies are just small pieses of text. Flash cookies are way different.

gHacks gives a good explanation of flash cookies and a link back to the original article about them here, as well as four ways to deal with them: A valuable article.

So, back to the topic: it puts a data collecting cookie on your system. Others can then harvest the info from these cookies, and do. Flash Cookies, a.k.a. Local Shared Objects (LSOs), are cookie-like data files that are stored on a computer. Flash Cookies are used by all versions of Adobe Flash Player.

“Cookies by their design constitute privacy concerns because they store data which may be retrieved by people or programs that are up to no good. Ordinary cleaners do remove regular cookies but do not remove these Flash Cookies, giving the user a false sense of security. Several services even use Flash Cookies as a data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called 're-spawning'. So even if a user gets rid of a website’s tracking cookie, that cookie’s unique ID will be assigned back to a new cookie again using the Flash data as the ‘backup’. If you value your privacy these Flash Cookies should be removed.” – Softpedia

The Flash Cookies Cleaner application was developed to be a small tool that has been designed specifically to remove every Flash Cookie from your system.

It’s free, and I use it.

I stopped telling my mom where I went a long time ago.

Download link: http://www.flashcookiecleaner.com/