Adobe Condemns Misuse of Flash Cookies for SEO Marketing
Software designer Adobe recently decried the use of its Flash graphics framework as a tool to provide marketing data for search engine optimisation. In an official statement, Adobe condemned "this type of misuse of local storage. We encourage developers to use technology responsibly, and certainly not in ways that circumvents the user's intentions or reasonable expectations."
Flash is stored differently than standard HTML cookies. With the latter, one can erase one's browsing history periodically. However, since Flash requires local storage to run most of its content, marketers can exploit it by tracking cookies there continuously. Last summer, researchers at the University of California found that Flash was widely misused to "re-instantiate HTTP cookies deleted by the user."
Adobe also issued a formal comment to the Federal Trade Communication in support of a proposed online privacy bill. Researchers at the University of California also found that privacy policies which governed this issue were insufficiently clear to prevent Flash misuse.
