[ephramzerb]

The nice thing is that browsers provide good control for managing one's cookies, and browsers like Safari ship with pretty sensible, user-friendly defaults (block cookies from 3rd party sites).

The current privacy Valdez is flash cookies, which are shockingly ubiquitous. You can't clear them easily (clearing browser cookies won't work) and they bypass browser cookie defaults. I polled a lot of developers and just about every single one of them had no idea about them -- and if that demographic is oblivious to them, imagine the rest of the population.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/you-deleted-your-cook...

[nzmsv]

After I installed NoFlash in Firefox, I was surprised at how many sites have the Flash cookie thing. I never knew :)

Personally, I don't really care about the tracking all that much. I'm extremely boring :) Which is why these cookies persist. I think most people simply don't care, even if they know about them. The only reason I block Flash is because it crashes Firefox on a regular basis.

[dhimes]

  alias playFlash='chmod 777 ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/\#SharedObjects'

  alias clearFlash='rm -rf ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/\#SharedObjects/*'

  alias stopFlash='chmod 555 ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/\#SharedObjects'