Fergie's Tech Blog

Adobe's Flash and Apple's Safari Fail a Privacy Test

Brad Stone writes on The New York Times' "Bits" Blog:

Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari all compete to give users the most control over their online identities and the best protection from Web sites that use “cookies,” those unique identifiers that can track users online.

So how effective are the newest batch of browser privacy tools? Kate McKinley, a researcher at iSec Partners, a San Francisco security firm, sought to find out.

In a paper [.pdf] published Tuesday, Ms. McKinley found particular problems with Safari and concluded that none of the four major browsers extends its privacy protections to Adobe’s immensely popular Flash plug-in, which is used to display Web animations and video.

posted by Fergie @ 12/30/2008 07:39:00 PM