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As a follow on from my previous post about the prevention of tracking scripts and web bugs, I thought I'd do a quick how-to for blocking "Flash cookies".

Flash cookies can store up to 100k of data on your machine, which is around 25 times the size of a standard browser cookie. They are a serious threat to privacy because as well as being able to hold large amounts of data, they exist outside of the browser's normal content management system making it very difficult to easily manage which sites can set data and what is contained in each cookie. Often sites will use Flash cookies to regenerate normal browser cookies across sessions.

These days it's hard to find a website that isn't using a analytics and/or tracking software to profile visitors. The use of analytics, cookies, web-bugs, and even advertising banners to track users actions (often across multiple sites) is commonplace and can be used to trace a user quite effectively. However, it is quite easy to set up Privoxy to prevent analytics scripts, cookies and web-bugs from tracking you.