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Facebook Users Complain of New Ad-Based Tracking
Tech.Luver noted a story about facebook users complaining over ads where their shopping habits are shared with their friends as if they are endorsing products. The neatest part is that you can opt out- if you click a box that disappears after 20 seconds... wait to long, and they assume you are totally fine with it.
Is that you cannot actually delete all of the information in your profile with ease. You can deactivate your account, but all of your information is still on their servers and will load right back up if you log in again. To actually delete your profile you have to delete EVERY SINGLE THING from it. That's right, every post on your wall, every picture, you have to individually delete each of them. Fun times.
Facebooks' policy is, and has always been, "It's better to ask forgiveness, than permission" with regards to policy. They claim to be for your privacy, but whenever they roll out a new feature that might be a privacy concern, they opt you in and don't make any sort of announcement so it can be months before you notice that you can close out such features. I used to be on facebook, and I recently closed my account because of such bullshit. A lot of my friends, my fiance, my mom, etc., acted rather put-out like I'm intentionally avoiding them or something. It's wierd how much pressure I've felt (though not from my fiance, she gets it) to re-join. News like this is just what I need to show people why I left.
As I understand it, it doesn't compare email addresses, it uses a Facebook cookie. So, if you're logged into Facebook at the time, or you don't clear your cookies once you no longer need them, then it can tell.
/facebook.com/beacon/* would seem a good way to go as far as I can tell. There are also programmes (e.g. Spyblocker) that would let you do that if you're an IE user, rather than a Firefox one. (And, I think that Opera lets you do it in the browser.
The site has to install a small bit of code which creates the cookie.
I'm not entirely sure if Firefox etc. sees them as 3rd party cookies or not.
The suggestion that others have made of blocking
So, there are ways around it.
What annoys me, and from what I've seen, a lot of Facebook users, is that it's opt out on a site by site basis, unless you happen to know a lot about how it works. Which the average Facebook user doesn't, and while there are arguments that all internet users should be aware of all these tricks, I, personally, think that it's not really very fair of Facebook to work on the assumption that many don't know how to avoid it.
I use Firefox exclusively with NoScript installed. I clicked on the link, and... What the hell am I doing on this completely different site? And why is it trying to run JavaScript at me? Further, why is it trying to run a cross-site script from Facebook?
It was at this point that I began to suspect that the pages Facebook is presenting me are not, in fact, always generated by Facebook's servers, but instead can be cobbled together from any number of sites and servers located anywhere, and that these sites all exchange data transparently with Facebook.
I haven't read their developer's pages or their API specification, so I'm only guessing here. Does anyone know if this is in fact true?
Because if it is -- to borrow one of Jon Stewart's terms -- then it's an absolute catastrofuck of a design, and everyone but everyone should run screaming from Facebook as fast as they can.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Facebooks' policy is, and has always been, "It's better to ask forgiveness, than permission" with regards to policy.
Who cares about this? What's important is the long-term trend. Computers are networked. They are growing in power and complexity at an exponential rate. The algorithms for data processing and pattern-recognition software are being worked out at lightning speed.
Computers are sharing information. And, once leaked, it's basically impossible to contain it. And once leaked, this information is available for an indeterminate period of time - forever?
Why forever? Since storage capacity is growing exponentially, the need to purge old data is dropping exponentially, too. I have, on DVD, a hard disk image of my entire computer at around 1999. It's about 1 GB of data, and was a real hassle to get together back when I made it. But now, I've got a copy in a folder in my home directory on my Laptop, which has 160 GB HDD. It's not enough space for me to care - my disk usage is floating around 75% now, including my entire MP3 collection. (which dwarfs my old HDD)
I'm probably going to keep that old disk image, along with its ancient copy of freecell.exe forever. Not because I care at all about freecell.exe, but because the cost of actually deleting that file is far greater than the cost of keeping it around.
And so it is with leaked, marginally valuable information - the cost of leaving it "hanging around" is lower than the cost of identifying exactly what it is and deleting it. So this leaked information tends to "stick around" forever, and we have pattern recognition, AI, and search algorithms improving rapidly, which dramatically reduces the cost of identifying and reprocessing this marginal information. The end result is a human/machine meta-creature, a sort of swarm-like social animal like ants but with a common, shared intellect, lots like the GAIA from (you guessed it!) Asimov's Foundation series!
Asimov was a visionary in more ways than one...
Guess I'm rambling. I'll stop now.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.