Beat Advertisers Latest Info Harvesting

[oftentired]

Sometimes life is one shattered illusion after another, and it is the illusion of ourselves that is the most fragile. Susan Wilson

The latest efforts by the bad boys in advertising now include a rather insidious use of Macromedia Flash. This article describes it nicely and far better than I could do without repeating the article content.

You can defeat this new method of information storage by visiting the Macromedia Flash webpage that enables you to access the Flash Control Panel. Before you visit the webpage you should restore your Flash capability if you have it disabled. You can click the links I have placed in 1. and 2. below to be taken directly to the correct Flash Control Panel "tab" for each action.

You must do two things with the control panel. The first one protects against sites you might visit in the future. The second one protects against sites you have already visited. The instructions provided by Macromedia on these webpages linked below are very complete. I have provided some "guidance" information which may be duplicated there.

1. Access the second tab on the Control Panel called Global Storage Settings and move the slider to the left to set the allowed disk space to zero. You have the option of checkmarking never ask again. I suggest you do not checkmark that at this time. The important thing is to set the allowed disk space to zero.

2. Access the fifth tab on the Control Panel called Website Privacy Settings. Here it gets slightly more complicated. I took the easy route and simply Deleted all the sites listed so they would then be controlled by the Global Storage Settings I set in the other tab. That may not be the best choice for everyone as some websites that make use of some particular aspects of Flash capability will not work properly without being able to use some disk space for storage. If you have Trusted websites you already visit regularly which require storage space on your drive to work properly they should be listed in this section. You will have to specify what is allowed for each of those websites. If you don't recognize a website that is listed in this section of the Control Panel it should be safe to just Delete it from the list. If a website you visit in the future is not listed here and requires storage space it will ask you to be allowed to do so if you did not checkmark the "never ask again" box on the other tab.

[matrix0978]

Good article, thanks!