Getting rid of Flash cookies for good

It’s easy enough these days in most modern browsers for users to open windows for private browsing. People who use that feature expect that no trace of their research will remain accessible on their computers. But Adobe and its Flash product can really screw things up there, slipping, as it does, under the radar.

Want to see just what might be hiding in your Flash cookies? Visit Adobe here. Are you surprised? If so, what follows is the hardcore Linux way to solve this invasion of your privacy for good.

On Linux at least, if you use a number of browsers with Flash, all of your Flash cookies, regardless of the browser used, are saved in your home folder in a hidden folder:

.macromedia

In case it’s different on your machine, try searching for the Flash cookies at the command line (terminal) with:

find -iname ‘*.sol’

This will show you where those files are. Probably they are in the folder noted above. What follows assumes that they are in the folder noted above (which is where they probably are!).

Before starting, you can backup your macromedia folder with the following commands typed at the command line (terminal):

mkdir ./.macromedia.bak

and then:

cp -a ./.macromedia/* ./.macromedia.bak/

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Now, in the command line (terminal), type:

rm -rf ./.macromedia

This will remove the folder entirely. Now type:

ln -s /dev/null ./.macromedia

This links that folder, whenever it is re-made by any Flash file wanting to deposit a cookie, to /dev/null (a blackhole for data in Linux). Now, you can test to see that your link is working with:

ls -al ./.macromedia

This seeks to see if anything exists in your macromedia (non-)folder. It should return the following to you if it’s working properly:

./.macromedia -> /dev/null

And now you are done! No more Flash cookies! Test it out by going into incognito/secret/private mode in your browser and then going to Adobe’s own site to check if there are any of these cookies on your system.

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But what if you want to return to your previous state of exposure? Simply go to the command line (terminal) and type in:

sudo rm -rf ./.macromedia

and then, exchanging ‘accountname’ for your actual account name,

chown accountname:accountname ./.macromedia