I guess many of you are familiar with "flashcookies" (LSO/Local Shared Objects), but whatever you've heard about flashcookies it alone is nothing compared to evercookie which can pose a major new threat to online privacy.
For example and download:
samy.pl/evercookie/
From the description:
evercookie is a javascript API available that producesextremely persistent cookies in a browser. Its goal
is to identify a client even after they've removed standard
cookies, Flash cookies (Local Shared Objects or LSOs), and
others.
evercookie accomplishes this by storing the cookie data in
several types of storage mechanisms that are available on
the local browser. Additionally, if evercookie has found the
user has removed any of the types of cookies in question, it
recreates them using each mechanism available.
Specifically, when creating a new cookie, it uses the
following storage mechanisms when available:
- Standard HTTP Cookies
- Local Shared Objects (Flash Cookies)
- Silverlight Isolated Storage
- Storing cookies in RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached
PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out
- Storing cookies in Web History
- Storing cookies in HTTP ETags
- Storing cookies in Web cache
- window.name caching
- Internet Explorer userData storage
- HTML5 Session Storage
- HTML5 Local Storage
- HTML5 Global Storage
- HTML5 Database Storage via SQLite
TODO: adding support for:
- Caching in HTTP Authentication
- Using Java to produce a unique key based off of NIC info
Article in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/business/media/11privacy.html?hp
I'm not sure if CCleaner ever will be able to safely clean this type of cookie-storage. I'm not a programmer. But I just wanted to give you a heads up just in case.
Thanks for a invaluable software nonetheless.