If you are worried about cookies, you should not only be concerned about regular cookies. There are also flash and DOM cookies. Most people do not even know about DOM cookies – which can be disabled easily
What Browsers Use DOM Cookies?
DOM – short for Document Object Model – is a new cookie that is included in the following browser:
- Safari 4 and higher
- Chrome 4 and higher
- Opera 10.5 and higher
- Firefox 3 and higher
- IE8 and higher
This tutorial explains how to disable DOM cookies in Firefox
General Info:
DOM Storage is often compared with HTTP Cookies. DOM cookies store session specific, domain specific data as name/value pairs on the client-side. There is session storage and the localstorage.
As the name suggest, session storage only stores data during a regular session e.g. one visit to a particular website. Local storage on the other hand can be used for multiple sessions (multiple visits) and multiple browser windows.
Enable or Disable DOM Storage “Cookies” in Firefox
1. Step Open Mozilla Firefox-> In the Address bar type about:config-> Press Enter.
2. Step A message will come This might Void your Warranty-> Click on I’ll be careful, I promise!
3. Step From the long list, find dom.storage.enabled. The default value is true.
4. Step Double click to change the value to false and you are done.
This article doesn’t tell me why I should be worried about these cookies. What is the problem with them? Why are they are privacy or security risk?
Good question Gary. Most people know about cookies now, but a lot of people dont know Flash or DOM cookies. That’s why adware companies that sell your browsing habits and other data may store data via DOM cookies instead of regular cookies. So, that explains why they are more of a privacy risk.
I still need to do further research on this and what kind of information are usually stored in them, but if you don’t want your browsing behaviour to be tracked I recommend you may want to disable them and only allow regular cookies.
More importantly, clear your flash cookies. I see a lot of adware cookies using flash lately
Great, Thanks Oliver! Always better to be safe.
How do I know which cookies are flash cookies? I’m using firefox 30.0
-noob
mouse, you can check your flash cookies using the flash control panel. Only those cookies are flash cookies. Regular cookies can be deleted from within your browser without having to visit the flash control panel
You can access the flash control panel here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html
If you dont want to have to worry about flash tracking you get this extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flashcontrol/mfidmkgnfgnkihnjeklbekckimkipmoe?hl=en