Now that Nielsen/NetRatings has just confirmed JupiterResearch’s contentious study, I predict the use of Local Shared Objects is going to rapidly increase. Companies are going to want to keep track of their unique and repeat visitors, and cookies aren’t doing the job any more.
In case you haven’t been keeping up with the chatter, a ‘Local Shared Object’ is a text file that can be set from any browser with Flash enabled, and can function much like a cookie – except instead of holding 4K of information, it can hold up to 100K. Certain companies are already marketing LSOs as cookie backups – if you delete cookies to a site, it won’t matter, because when you return to the site their Flash will restore the cookie from the LSO. This blatant flouting of the user’s intent is sleazy, but it’ll be adopted by all kinds of people, because no one else has got a solution for user tracking, affiliate monitoring, and other mainstays of online business.
To anyone considering using LSOs, I recommend not bothering. It’ll be a waste of time; while these new Flash cookies aren’t as easily eraseable as the ordinary variety yet, I’m sure someone will get right on it. To see (and erase) your Local Shared Objects, click here for Macromedia’s Flash Player Settings Manager. Set the ‘global storage settings’ to ‘none’ to keep LSOs off your computer permanently; John Dowdell‘s got more details.
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How do we get shared objects (.sol) off our machine without having to go into Adobe website and allowing them to muck with our machines?
Is it safe to just DELETE the .sol files from the Macromedia subdirectory?
Yeah, its perfectly safe to delete the LSO’s from your hard disk – I’ve now installed a flashblocker for firefox so I can specify which flash apps i want to run when i visit a website. Hopefully this should help prevent people who want to track me using the LSO