Study: Adobe Flash Cookies Pose Vexing Privacy Questions

Fly:

jfd15 in Post #49 and I in Post#17 show that Google places us in a large, general geographic area. Are you saying Google has pinpointed your city and/or street address? How do you know this? Does it show in searches?

I don't have a Google account, nor do I store a Google cookie. Do you? What else is different with your setup?

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rich

 

Its my understanding that when you type an address in your browser that packet flys off to your ISP, jumps onto there DNS servers to get the address you want to go to resolved ... then it goes on its way jumping through many hops to reach its destination .

When it arrives at there server they can inspect the packet and resolve (get location, name ect ) all the IP address hops (servers) it passed, all the way back to the last resolved IP (where it came from). which if your have a dynamic IP will not be resolved , so the last address they can get a location for will be Your ISP.

Most people sign up with an ISP near there home , so the adds you see on web pages are pointed at your ISP's location not yours.

 

I don't have a Google account, and I don't have a Google toolbar.

I don't feel comfortable posting this.
I'll send you a PM, and trust that you'll keep my information private. If you can find out/know anything about this I'd appreciate a reply, probably preferably by PM.

 

That's interesting, are you saying they are identifying your location down to the town level or street level?

Can you divulge how you know, that they know this level of info? For instance is it plotting your town correctly in ads, or if you search for a broad query like "Plumbers" you get results in your town?

Interesting, i know they are doing a ton of work regarding geo-targeting with search and Adsense. For instance just a few years ago if someone on the east coast, and someone on the west coast of the US searched the same thing they would see essentially the same results. Now depending on locale trigger words, it can throw back totally different results.

I've got servers in Carolina, Dallas, Cali, Chicago etc and searching through them it's easy to see these geo effects.

But.. So far i haven't seen anything more accurate than regular ISP level resolving. For instance my IP says i'm in Sydney, but i'm about 400 Miles from there but all Google's geo-aware stuff says Sydney and nothing more accurate than that (yet).

 

I find using the flash manager on macromedia's site to set settings for flash LSO's very awkward. To test this i downloaded a .SOL viewer to check the settings.sol file stored in "macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys" . It needed 3 attemps to set third party lso's store limit to 0.

In the end i just denied write access to the macromedia folder ..no more flash cookies set on my machine. In vista this is located at Users\"your account"\Appdata\Roaming\Macromedia ... (show hidden files\folders needs to be set in folder options)

So far i have not seen any problems viewing flash content.

Update: it seems to cause problems on some flash content if i deny flash cookies write access ... ccleaner works well though.