frankie's Journal: every Flash site you ever visited...

...may be recorded quietly on your hard drive, even if you had Flash erase all stored data. Everyone knows about Flash cookies and their largish abuse potential. But none of the sites I saw mentioned one little detail that's left behind, with no incriminating data signature to be detected in a file search.

When Flash removes its temp files and cookies for a site, it fails to remove the surrounding folder. And of course the folder's name is the site domain.

Look in your preferences directory for Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects and you will probably find a lot of unwanted history. You can safely delete the whole folder, but it's somewhat painful if there are one or two Flash-based sites whose persistence data you do want to retain.