Web analytics collecting companies use cookies to track Internet usage and pages visited for marketing research.
According to TRUSTe: "You can get valuable marketing insight by tracking individual users' movements on your site.
In 2015, TURN, an online advertising clearinghouse,[8] introduced zombie cookies based on Flash Local Shared objects.
The term "zombie cookie" was created by Attorney Joseph H. Malley who initiated the Super-cookie Class Actions in 2010.
The etiology of the phrase was derived from his prior research into Apple's third-party iPhone applications.
Blending the two ideas, he first coined the phrase Zombie Cookies within his filed Class Actions, as a means to enable the court, jury, and public understand the basis of the litigation.
[citation needed] The Zombie Cookie lawsuits were filed suit in the United States District Court for the Central District of California against Quantcast, Clearspring, VideoEgg, and affiliated sites owned by Walt Disney Internet Group, Warner Bros. and others.
According to the charges, Adobe Flash cookies are planted to "track Plaintiffs and Class Members that visited non-Clearspring Flash Cookie Affiliates websites by having their online transmissions intercepted, without notice or consent".
After an article by ProPublica revealed this fact in January 2015, TURN claimed it had suspended usage of their zombie cookies.