Is PIE the New Cookie?

A company called United Virtualities offers PIE - Persistent Identification Element based onm Macromedia Flash.

There are two flavors of PIE:

"AccuCounter PIE, a cookie replacement that counts Unique users accurately
Backup PIE: a PIE that not only counts unique users but also recognizes the visitor and restores any erased cookies."

Are Shared Objects the New Cookie?

A recent ClicZ Article by Zachary Rodgers reports that technology, based on Macromedia's Flash could replace cookies as a tracking methodology.

Recent research indicates nearly 40 percent of Web users delete their cookies every 30 days...so cookies are becoming less effective.

The new technology is based on Macromedia's Flash MX's "local shared objects" (SOs), which can be placed on a user's machine by adding Javacript to a Web page. SOs are similar to cookies, but users don't know what they are, and therefore don't delete them. Commercial anti-spyware applications also do not typically block these files.

John Quarto-vonTivadar, CTO of Future Now Inc. and co-chair of the Web Analytics Association's technology committee said "SO's can store many orders of magnitude more information than a cookie can and are also not affected by browser settings but by the Flash player settings."