Facebook is Watching

Submitted by Linda Cole on Wed, 10/05/2011 - 23:55

Facebook is reaching a creep level that has even me looking over my shoulder.  Last week it was revealed that Facebook uses cookies to track your activity on the internet every time you visit a site that contains a Facebook widget, even when you are not logged in. 

Cookies never bothered me before; they were useful, they remembered my user name and password for me; they even remember products I've looked at so that I don't have to search for them again.  But tracking my movement around the internet is crossing a line.  Perhaps I'm a bit paranoid but I don't think so.

The two most offensive cookies, the a_user cookie, which works as a personal identifier for the user that can afterward be examined by Facebook or third-party sites, and the a_xs cookie have been removed, although other cookies still remain.

On September 25, 2011, Nic Cubrilovic blogged that 'Logging Out of Facebook [was] Not Enough.'  The same day a Facebook spokesperson posted 'Facebook does not track users across the web,' and a Facebook employee posted '…we have no interest in tracking people.'  Sounds good, if you don't couple it with the fact that Facebook filed for a patent titled 'Communicating Information in a Social Network System about Activities from Another Domain' on September 22, 2011, two days before they said they didn't track users and had no interest in tracking users.  The patent abstract states the following:

"…a method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain. The method includes maintaining a profile for each of one or more users of the social networking system, each profile identifying a connection to one or more other users of the social networking system and including information about the user. The method additionally includes receiving one or more communications from a third-party website having a different domain than the social network system, each message communicating an action taken by a user of the social networking system on the third-party website. The method additionally includes logging the actions taken on the third-party website in the social networking system, each logged action including information about the action."

Given the conflicting statements, should we believe Facebook when they say that the a_user and a_xs  cookies were 'simply a mistake that…automatically downloaded to users' computers when they logged in to Facebook 'inadvertently' sent information to the company, whether or not they were logged in at the time?'

 

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