New Form Of HTML5 Cookies Now Tracking iOS Devices

Simply clearing cookies has never been an effective way to keep yourself anonymous online. Between HTML5's DOM storage, Flash's Local Shared Objects, Silverlight's Local Storage and new techniques like browser fingerprinting (https://panopticlick.eff.org/) there are much more effective ways for advertisers to keep track of you. Bottom line, if you don't want to be tracked/targeted by advertisers online you should be using tools like BetterPrivacy or simply using the advertiser's opt-out functionality. Some trackers like BlueKai (http://tags.bluekai.com/registry) actually offer a great deal of transparency into what they're tracking about you and allow you to control how that data is used.

IMO mobile browsers are way behind in any sort of privacy options compared to desktop browsers (and they arent very good in general).

Hopefully, people will start realizing this and start clamoring for better privacy which would be even more relevant given the geolocation implications.

Right now, I can see that Palm sends every app start/stop event along with a whole slew of other events back to a Palm website and I'm sure Apple does the same.

It would be interesting to measure how much battery life increases when smartphones are not forced to report large amounts of usage information back to the manufacturer.

Well, in this case clearing the storage won't be enough as it seems like the ad uses the device identifier to track you and restore the database right after.

DOM storage is cleared by default in the clear browser data menu in Firefox and (likely) Chrome. This is trivial to fix by making the iOS 'clear cookies' option also clear DOM storage, which I would assume Apple would eventually do.