Adobe on Thursday released Flash Player 10.3, which includes enhanced privacy controls for how your activity is tracked online.
Users can now clear local storage—sometimes known as "Flash cookies"—on versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. "Cookies" are little bits of data collected about your Internet activity. They can be useful—like remembering passwords and settings on sites that you surf to frequently—but there are also concerns about targeted advertising and how much data is really collected.
Web cookies can be deleted, but management of cookies inside products like Flash are a bit more complex. With Flash Player 10.3, however, users on Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 8 and 9 can now wipe the data stored by installed browser plugins. It's also available for the dev channel version of Chrome 11 and will be in a future release of Apple Safari.
In Firefox 4, the "Clear All History" option has a "Cookies" option. Check it and click "Clear Now" to delete. On IE, the "Delete Browsing History" window will also have a "Cookies" option, which reads: "Files stored on your computer by websites to save preferences such as login information." Check it and hit "Delete."
To make this happen, Adobe teamed up with the open-source browser community to develop a new API known as ClearSiteData NPAPI.
"This new API allows the browsers to communicate a user's desire to wipe user data stored by installed browser plugins," Adobe said in a blog post. "Now, when end-users go into their browser settings to clear their browser history or clear their cookies, they will be able to clear both their browser data as well as their plugin data."
Any plugin can participate, and Adobe is the first to support the API.
Adobe has also simplified how users can manage their settings. Until now, users had to right-click on content and select "Global Settings" or visit Adobe's Flash Player Settings Manager. That was a bit complex, however, so Flash Player 10.3 includes a new native control panel for Windows, Mac, and Linux that allows users to manage all aspects of the Flash player including camera, microphone, and Flash cookies. On Windows, for example, this is accessible via Control Panel>Programs.
Flash Player 10.3 also includes an auto-update feature for Mac OS.
"In the past, Mac users often had trouble keeping up with Flash Player updates since the Mac OS and Flash Player ship schedules are not in sync," Adobe said. "With this new feature, Flash Player will automatically check each week for new updates and notify the user when new updates are available."
Flash cookies, or local shared objects (LSO), made headlines last year when the Federal Trade Commission released a report that called on browser makers to include a "do not track" option in their products. The FTC also mentioned Adobe because it said the cookies gathered by Flash are collected regardless of the browser's settings.
Adobe added an in-private browsing option to Flash Player 10.1, which allows users to surf and play video content without having their activity tracked. But now, users can delete LSOs from their browser settings, whether they are using normal browsing or private.
Flash Player 10.3 is available for download on Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows on the Adobe Web site.