A lawsuit was filed against Walt Disney's internet subsidiary and several of its partners over allegedly using cookies based on Adobe's Flash Player to track highly personal information about their users, many of whom were children. Locally shared objects (LSOs) are better known as Flash Cookies, and their ability to gather detailed user information over long periods of time without a trace has been understood since at least 2007. The lawsuit claims that the technology was used by websites to track users in ways that violate the sites' privacy policies.
The filing was submitted with the US District Court in Los Angeles against Walt Disney Internet Group, Clearspring Technologies, Warner Bros. Records, and several other companies that shared the cookies. The complaint states that the affiliates fail to adequately warn users about the information-sharing arrangement which allows “zombie cookies” to be restored even after a user has gone through the trouble of deleting them.
“Using Flash cookies to re-identify users overrides this control, with little available redress for users,” the complaint, which seeks class-action status, states. “Although users may arguably protect themselves by periodically deleting their Flash cookies as well, the means for doing so are extremely obscure and difficult even for savvy consumers to use. Flash specifically attempts to obfuscate data within each LSO by controlling the format and forcing a binary serialization of any stored data, thus bypassing the web browser's same-origin policies, allowing an application hosted on one domain to read data or code hosted on another.”
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