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Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents

Ad firm sued for allegedly re-creating deleted cookies

A major ad-serving and tracking company has been hit with a federal lawsuit …

Specificmedia, one of the net's largest ad-serving and tracking companies, has been hit with a federal lawsuit accusing the company of violating computer intrusion laws by secretly re-creating cookies deleted by users.

The lawsuit (.pdf), filed in California's Central District federal court last Wednesday, is the third such suit filed this month by privacy attorney Joseph Malley. The first "zombie" cookie suit targeted sites ranging from MTV to Scribd that used technology from a company called Quantcast, while the second suit went after Disney and Demand Media for their use of similar tech from Clearspring Technologies.

At issue is the use of Adobe Flash to keep copies of a user's browser cookies in order to re-spawn cookies after users clear them. The lawsuits allege that the companies did not explain to users how they were using Flash and that using the storage capabilities of Flash for this purpose violates federal privacy and computer security laws.


The suit seeks class action status and upwards of $5 million in damages. Malley has a privacy track record that includes suits against online spying company NebuAd and a $9.5 million settlement with Facebook over its ill-received Beacon advertising program.

Specificmedia, which is the largest online ad network not owned by a giant such as Microsoft or Google, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment, and attempts to reach the company by phone were unsuccessful.

Adobe’s Flash software is installed on an estimated 98 percent of personal computers, and has been a key part of the explosion of online video, powering video players for sites such as YouTube and Hulu.



What's even sneakier?

Several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called ‘re-spawning’ in homage to video games where players come back to life even after being "killed," the report found. So even if a user gets rid of a website’s tracking cookie, that cookie’s unique ID will be assigned back to a new cookie again using the Flash data as the “backup.”


Those who are looking to have more control over their cookies in all forms can find some help in two add-ons for Firefox: BetterPrivacy and from Abine.

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