Banish Flash cookies forever under Linux

LINUX USERS can banish forever Adobe's Flash Player cookies, which can be a good idea because, for one thing, as a plugin Flash doesn't observe web browsers' Private Browsing modes.

Like other kinds of web cookies, you have no idea what these are doing, but it's a fair bet that they might enable inquisitive websites to track your browsing habits. However, you can find and delete these Flash cookies. You can also banish them forever, if you're using Linux.

Open a Terminal window and use the su command to gain superuser access, that is, root user status. If you're running Ubuntu or another Linux distro that follows that philosophy about superuser access, just prefix all of these commands with sudo instead.

To find the Flash Player cookies on your system, use the command find -iname '*.sol' and that should list a bunch of files under the ./.macromedia subdirectory under your /home/userid directory. It is likely that there will be a lot of them.

You'll probably want to delete all of these, but you don't want to break anything so you might want to back them up first. To do that, use the commands mkdir ./.macromedia.sav and cp -a ./.macromedia/* ./.macromedia.sav/.

Then you can delete that directory and all of those Flash Player cookie files by using rm -rf ./.macromedia. Always be careful when using the rm -rf command.

Now, link that directory to /dev/null with ln -s /dev/null ./.macromedia and, if you want, check to see that it worked with ls -al ./.macromedia. That should return ./.macromedia -> /dev/null just like you want.

At this point you can close and reopen your web browser and surf around the web to make sure you can still see Flash content.

In the unlikely event that you want to back this out, you can use mv ./.macromedia.sav ./.macromedia and chown userid:userid ./.macromedia, where userid is your own non-root user ID, to put the Flash Player files back.

When you're satisfied that this hasn't broken Flash, you can use rm -rf ./.macromedia.sav to delete the backup you made earlier.

You can also do the same thing with your ./.adobe/Flash_Player directory, if you have one.

A similar approach might work with Apple's Mac OS X, which is built on top of BSD Unix and thus similar to the Unix-like Linux. And perhaps some Windows users will post MS-DOS commands in the comments. µ