how do you clear beacons?
Hi. The Wall Street Journal has just had a series of articles including today, August 5th on companies tracking your every movement including every keystroke you make. Most of the sites were reported as typically having 50-67 tracking devices such as cookies, flash cookies and beacons. I had no idea and it bothers me. The articles state that the information gleaned from leaving cookies on people's computers is used not only to advertise on pages that I look at with their wares but they sell my privacy information to OTHER companies as well ! Check out the amazing articles. WSJ.com is their website. Like I said they have a series of articles. One is called WHAT THEY KNOW. I am not savy on the computer. I only was concerned about privacy and it is troubling to me that many companies and websites typically send out many trackers. Bing, Google, Yahoo, dictionary.com, you name it, they send tons of cookies. One thing that really bothers me is I keep seeing ads for a woman with a fat belly. I do not have that, and it is very embarrassing. They actually have pop up ads and ads with cartoons of woman with a bloated belly. It is humiliating and if I visit blogs the ads follow me. If I look at car ads or whatever, the ads follow me, and I find it deeply troubling. Also that there is a company that can read every keystroke. Wow that is scary. So, I have never entered a question here before, nor have I ever visited mozilla's support system. I hope I can find it if you answer me. Perhaps you can email me the answer in case I cannot find your answer on this. Thank you very, very much for hopefully addressing this serioius problem. By the way, I had to enable cookies to go to this section after learning how to get rid of them and third party cookies. But mozilla does not have one for beacons and flash cookies which the article says are sneakier. Please advise. Sincerely, wish2go@verizon.net
All Replies (4)
The only easy way to avoid Flash cookies is to disable flash. Tools > Addons > Plug-ins Select Adobe Flash Player and click Disable.
There are several ways that advertisers track visitors: web beacons, cookies, and flash cookies.
In addition to Cww's excellent advice, you can install these Firefox addons to give you more control over your privacy:
BetterPrivacy - to control/delete flash cookies
Ghostery - to block web page beacons
In Firefox's settings, you can set it to delete your browsing history each time you close Firefox. Or you can delete it manually.
Additionally, you can install AdBlockPlus to prevent ads from showing while you surf. This will not prevent tracking, but it will prevent you from seeing the ads. If there is a website on which you wish to view ads, you can add them to ABP's whitelist.
Just a suggestion: Do not post your email address in any of the public forums you post. Spammers might come to public forums and free classified ads sites (especially on Craigslist) to "hunt" for email addresses in order to send out spams.
I guess most people do not know how to go about deleting cookies! I only just learned about flash cookies, of which I found more than 400 on my Mac.
Thanks to Klaus from UK, I learned, where they are located in Mac OS X: /User’s Home Folder/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/FlashPlayer/#SharedObjects.
The Flash cookies are stored in: /User’s Home Folder/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/macromedia dot com/support/flashplayer/sys . Note the written dot com! Firefox thought it was an URL.
In OS X Local Shared Objects, or Flash Cookies, are appended with a .sol suffix. Flush, delete one or all Flash cookies (.sol) and their settings.
Hope it helps other unaware Mac users!