Jul 27,2010

Privacy Lawsuit Targets Net Giants Over ‘Zombie’ Cookies

A wide swath of the net’s top websites, including MTV, ESPN, MySpace, Hulu, ABC, NBC and Scribd, were sued in federal court Friday on the grounds they violated federal computer intrusion law by secretly using storage in Adobe’s Flash player to re-create cookies deleted by users. At issue is technology from Quantcast, also targeted in the lawsuit. Quantcast created Flash cookies that track users across the web, and used them to re-create traditional browser cookies that users deleted from their computers. These “zombie” cookies came to light last year, after researchers at UC Berkeley documented deleted browser cookies returning to life. ...

Filed Under: Online Security, The Courts, flash cookies, privacy, quantcast, zombie cookies, Tags: , , ,

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