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Facebook Privacy: Site Confirms It Tracks You After You Leave

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Re: Facebook Privacy: Site Confirms It Tracks You After You Leave

#61

Post by orijing »

> Bejar acknowledged that Facebook could learn where specific members go on the Web when they are logged off by matching the unique PC and browser characteristics logged by both the session cookie and the browser cookie.

> He emphasized that Facebook makes it a point not to do this. " We've said that we don't do it, and we couldn't do it without some form of consent and disclosure," Bejar says.

A better title would be "Facebook /could/ track users via the Like widgets, but doesn't do it yet"

Re: Facebook Privacy: Site Confirms It Tracks You After You Leave

#62

Post by billiamram »

cpeterso wrote: post #50
steve-howard wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. I rarely bother with Facebook any more , but when I want to share something, copy and paste is not hard. The "social buttons" don't solve a problem, IMO. actually, what started the decline was the very subject of this article. I don't like Facebook watching where I go, and I started putting Facebook in another browser; naturally, I'm on Facebook less because it's harder to get to.

> I started putting Facebook in another browser In theory, using a separate browser is not adequate protection from tracking. The Flash Player's "Shared Objects" (aka Flash cookies) are stored in a common directory, so the same Flash data is accessible from any browser running as the same user. I do not believe Facebook's tracking is this nefarious, but the method would be quite easy to implement.

Disable flash in the browser that runs only facebook?

Re: Facebook Privacy: Site Confirms It Tracks You After You Leave

#63

Post by ams6110 »

billiamram wrote: post #62
cpeterso wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I started putting Facebook in another browser In theory, using a separate browser is not adequate protection from tracking. The Flash Player's "Shared Objects" (aka Flash cookies) are stored in a common directory, so the same Flash data is accessible from any browser running as the same user. I do not believe Facebook's tracking is this nefarious, but the method would be quite easy to implement.

Disable flash in the browser that runs only facebook?

I've gone a step further and disabled it across the board.

Re: Facebook Privacy: Site Confirms It Tracks You After You Leave

#64

Post by chunkyslink »

cpeterso wrote: post #50
steve-howard wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. I rarely bother with Facebook any more , but when I want to share something, copy and paste is not hard. The "social buttons" don't solve a problem, IMO. actually, what started the decline was the very subject of this article. I don't like Facebook watching where I go, and I started putting Facebook in another browser; naturally, I'm on Facebook less because it's harder to get to.

> I started putting Facebook in another browser In theory, using a separate browser is not adequate protection from tracking. The Flash Player's "Shared Objects" (aka Flash cookies) are stored in a common directory, so the same Flash data is accessible from any browser running as the same user. I do not believe Facebook's tracking is this nefarious, but the method would be quite easy to implement.

Relevant. The Evercookie.

http://samy.pl/evercookie/

Re: Facebook Privacy: Site Confirms It Tracks You After You Leave

#65

Post by ceol »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #34
Periodic wrote: post #21

The part that scares me is that we, as web designers/developers/owners, are complicit in this. We are the ones who are putting social buttons on every page. We love this functionality, but they aren't giving it to us for free. We are trading them our user's information and browsing habits. I'm not worried about the ethics of Facebook. I don't think a site like Facebook should be prevented from doing this openly. I'm…

Proud to not be a part of this "we". These social buttons are a plague on the web. They take something which is beautifully decentralized, and then create a single point of failure, and allow companies to create massive databases of private information from it as well. You can host an image locally, and create a link using it. You don't need to hand over the browser of all of your visitors to one or more AD companies…

I think your parent post was talking about the Facebook Like/Google+ +1 buttons. In order for those to work, I believe they need to be loaded on the page via an iframe.

Things like Facebook's "share" and Twitter's "tweet" buttons don't execute any arbitrary (i.e. not specified by the developer) JavaScript.

Re: Facebook Privacy: Site Confirms It Tracks You After You Leave

#66

Post by bobwaycott »

Doesn't it seem like time for a browser to get involved in protecting privacy? Maybe that's a stupid question. This just leaves me thinking I'd really like it if my browser only shared my cookies when I'm actually visiting the site requesting them, else it'd ignore the requests altogether.

No doubt that's either dumb, not possible, or something someone already thought of.

Re: Facebook Privacy: Site Confirms It Tracks You After You Leave

#67

Post by toffer »

rosser wrote: post #2

This is why I visit Facebook in one browser, G* in another, and everything else in yet a third.

Better yet, use Fluid[1] and create a single site browser for Facebook. Make sure you use the paid version of Fluid App, so you get separate cookie storage for each SSB you set up.

[1]: http://fluidapp.com

Re: Facebook Privacy: Site Confirms It Tracks You After You Leave

#68

Post by ahrjay »

bobwaycott wrote: post #66

Doesn't it seem like time for a browser to get involved in protecting privacy? Maybe that's a stupid question. This just leaves me thinking I'd really like it if my browser only shared my cookies when I'm actually visiting the site requesting them, else it'd ignore the requests altogether. No doubt that's either dumb, not possible, or something someone already thought of.

There is the do not track initiative[1] but it's kind of a pretty please solution.

[1] http://dnt.mozilla.org/

Re: Facebook Privacy: Site Confirms It Tracks You After You Leave

#69

Post by nickand »

lurchpop wrote: post #57

solution is to install the adBlockPlus extension, open up any page, say, techcrunch.com, then open the extension dialog and block external domains like twitter, facebook, google, google-analytics, etc.

Do you need the paid version to block external domains?

Re: Facebook Privacy: Site Confirms It Tracks You After You Leave

#70

Post by dspillett »

This is why I keep facebook in a separate browser. The could technically still track me using flash cookies but as the site isn't on my "can play flash content" whitelist this is no issue either.

It means I can't comment on a growing number of sites that use fb for their comments system, but that is no loss to me in my not-so-humble opinion.

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