Flash Cookies- another privacy concern

Joe,

My understanding is that CCleaner removes Flash Cookies (Applications / Multimedia / Adobe Flash Player).

Joe, My understanding is that CCleaner removes Flash Cookies (Applications / Multimedia / Adobe Flash Player).

ky331:

That was my understanding also.

I always had that Multimedia/Adobe Flash Player box checked for deletion, and ran CCleaner every night.

But when I ran Flash Cookies Cleaner 1.2, I discovered otherwise, which prompted the above post.

Joe,

My understanding is that the particular flash cookie

C:\Documents and Settings\user's_name\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys\settings.sol

holds all the choices/customizations that you make at the Flash Player Control Panel.

If so, the first advice you offer that "You can block these LSOs using the Macromedia Flash Player control panel",

is then defeated/undone by using the Flash Cookies Cleaner program to remove that cookie!!

(or by running CCleaner to remove "all" Flash Cookies.... I have made that one particular cookie an exception in CCleaner:   Options / Exclude.)

You might want to test this out further, to see if you can confirm or refute what I've just said.

----

On this machine, CCleaner initially found only 2 Flash Cookies (aside from the one I've made an exception).   whereas Flash Cookie Cleaner claimed there were a total of 12 cookies AND FOLDERS (including my exception) [I believe it was 3 cookies and 9 folders].   After removing the 2 Flash cookies via CCleaner, Flash Cookie Cleaner then found only 2 Flash "Objects" remaining:   the exceptional cookie, and an empty FOLDER. 

You are correct! Thanks.

Because I had not been excluding the settings.sol file from that particular folder in CCleaner's exlusions, I kept erasing my Flash security settings every time I ran CCleaner, and thus kept getting Flash cookies placed on my system.

Thus CCleaner seems to be the more efficient program to use to erase and block these Flash files while maintaining your Flash security settings, providing CCleaner and Flash Player Control Panel are properly configured.

Flash Cookies Cleaner 1.2 is still of some use to detect the presence of  *.sol files (being quicker than running a search). After configuring CCleaner correctly to exclude that file, I'm seeing only that one (empty) alpha-numeric titled folder, and only that one settings.sol file also.

For those who are as confused by all of this as I was, and who use both Flash Player and CCleaner, I would suggest:

1) Open your Flash Player Control Panel to set your security & privacy settings here.

For maximum security, set your:
- Global Privacy Settings to "Always deny ..."
- Global Storage Settings slider to "Zero" (the far left), and uncheck all the options below this,
- Global Security Settings to "Always deny ..."
- Global Notification Settings to check "Notify me when an update to Flash Player is available"
- Website Privacy Settings to "Always deny"
- Website Storage Settings slider to "zero" (the far left)
- Peer Assisted Networking Settings: check "Disable P2P uplink for all"
- Close the FP Control Panel

2) Configure CCleaner to delete those Flash Cookies, yet maintain your Flash Player security settings:
- Open CCleaner>Applications tab>Under Multimedia put a check next to "Adobe Flash Player"
- In the left-hand column, click on Options>Exclude>Add button (right-hand column)
- Under "Files and folders to exclude", browse to:
C:\Documents and Settings\ \Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys\settings.sol >click OK
- Close CCleaner

(Red sky at night _and the executives delight)