IDG News Service - Adobe has released an
important update to its Flash Player software that fixes critical security flaws and gives users a better way of controlling whether they are being tracked on the Web.
The Flash Player 10.3 update, released Thursday, lets users manage Flash cookies using their browser's privacy settings or through a new control panel. Flash cookies, also called "Local Stored Objects," have been a sore spot for Adobe users since 2009, when
researchers showed they were being used extensively to track Web surfers. The problem is that Flash cookies historically have been hard to remove, unlike traditional cookies, and some sites have used them to track users who have wanted to block cookies.
Cookies are small snippets of text, stored on the computer, that websites use to identify repeat visitors.
"Users could manage the [Flash cookies] before, however, the experience was not exactly the most user-friendly," Adobe spokeswoman Wiebke Lips said via e-mail.
Read More
