Flash cookies can be used to track you across the Web without telling you.

The more I use Adobe Flash, the more I understand why Steve Jobs hates it. I can't tell you how many times a misbehaving Flash video has crashed my browser and/or slowed my system to sludge. Happens at least once a week.

Well, here's another good reason to hate Flash: Advertisers are using it to track your movements across the Web.

Or so claims a lawsuit filed by privacy attorney Joseph Malley, one of three he's filed in the last two months against some of the biggest media heavyweights in the world -- Disney, ABC, NBC, MTV, and a host of others.

[ See also: Beware of 'Free' Apple iPad scams on Facebook ]

All use them employ Web ad companies like Quantcast,
Specificmedia, and Clearspring to deliver Flash ads, and all of those ads store Flash cookies on your hard drive.

So what's wrong with that? For one thing, most people aren't aware Flash even stores cookies. These cookie files are ridiculously hard to find and manage: You can't get at them from your browser, and they're buried several layers deep inside your Application Data folder on Windows PCs. They can store up to 100K of data per cookie, or about 25 times what a browser cookie can store. And they can be used to recreate tracking cookies you've deleted.

In other words, if you've told an advertiser you don't want to be followed around the Web by deleting its tracking cookie, that advertiser can use Flash to 'respawn' that deleted cookie without telling you -- and continue to track you in secret. Thus Malley's lawsuits, which accuse all of those companies of breaking federal laws against computer intrusion and surveillance.

That respawning bit is why Flash cookies are also called "zombie" cookies. However, like real zombies, they can be stopped -- and you don't even have to cut off their heads (or use cricket bats and vinyl LPs, like in Shaun of the Dead). You just need to use Adobe's Flash Player Settings Manager.

Though you access that control panel via the Web, it's an app that runs on your PC. Naturally, the Adobe tool uses Flash -- and (naturally) the first six times I tried to run the app it crashed my browser. In fact, the Settings Manager was blinking so wildly I feared it might induce an epileptic fit. But eventually, after way too much trial and error, I got it to work.

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