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."
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.
Flash Player 10.3 also includes an auto-update feature for Mac OS.
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