You raised some really good point about the default settings implemented by Adobe and the simple fact that Adobe, though not hiding LSOs, is not doing anything to advertise their existence either. — If you recall, Adobe was a Mac-linked product for many years before gaining prominence on Windows machines, and Mac’s attitude was, is, and most likely always will be “you don’t need to know”.

If this is the best thing you have to block spammers, you are truly defenseless. If it actually worked well, spammers would just trash the LSO’s regularly and soon all your base would belong to them.

So you REALLY think it’s okay to have a browser object that you install which does the following?

1. Silently makes a history of almost every site you have ever went to.
2. Gives you no warning that it is doing this.
3. Keeps this history indefinitely.
4. Makes you go to their own website to clear this history.

I’d have to say no to all 4. I’m not one of those people who has ever spent an instant whining about “evil cookies.” With standard cookies, they’re integrated into browsers and the OS. They’re established, well publicized, and have reasonable, customizable policies for management.

If Adobe’s best “reasonable and customizable” policy is to not publicize that they do this and give you no way to delete these via local machine or browser? Well, I don’t care what their intent is.

- If they are “VERY concerned with properly managing these LSO” then why aren’t they informing users when they install flash?

- If “This may not be as graceful as your browser’s cookie management” then why don’t they… GASP, work within the browser’s own data management? Or give a good API to browsers which allows them to manage ubiquitous Flash LSO’s? If you’re basically reinventing the cookie in a bigger form, couldn’t you even imitate the same paradigm?

- Why can’t Adobe manage these things half as good as a third party? Seriously. Better Privacy firefox add-on. Has just about all basic settings and views that I need to manage LSOs. Probably made by some annoyed guy over the course of 3 weeks worth of lonely evenings.

To me, it seems like a cop out. Regardless of how “worried” Adobe is, they have done a horrible job at allowing users to manage these things. That’s like saying that a parent is “worried” about child safety while their kid is playing in the street. At some point in time, outcome matters. And these things have been around for a couple years now, so being able to work this out is inexcusable.