09. May 2010 · Comments Off on New New Adobe Flash privacy feature will force e-commerce sites to alternative authentication methods · Categories: Authentication, Privacy · Tags: , ,

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 will make "its privacy settings more prominent and explicit to the user and also supports private browsing, which lets a user browse without logging his browsing history on his machines," according to an article in Dark Reading. The side effect is that e-commerce sites which have been using Flash's Local Storage to store machine ID's without the user's consent or knowledge will no longer be a viable machine authentication method.

This is actually good news because e-commerce sites will be forced to use technology designed specifically for authentication rather than relying on this Adobe externality.