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Facebook's 'Like This' Button Is Tracking You

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the of-course-they-are dept.

Stoobalou submitted a story about some of the most obvious research I've seen in a while ... "A researcher from a Dutch university is warning that Facebook's 'Like This' button is watching your every move. Arnold Roosendaal, who is a doctoral candidate at the Tilburg University for Law, Technology and Society, warns that Facebook is tracking and tracing everyone, whether they use the social networking site or not. Roosendaal says that Facebook's tentacles reach way beyond the confines of its own web sites and subscriber base because more and more third party sites are using the 'Like This' button and Facebook Connect."

10 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Not that hard to kill facebook's tracking by gurps_npc · · Score: 4, Informative

    Noscript, Taco with Abine, BetterPrivacy.

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
    1. Re:Not that hard to kill facebook's tracking by BitZtream · · Score: 2, Informative

      Except the article is about facebook tracking everyone on sites other than facebook, such as when you go to some stores website and they have a 'Like It' button for all their products ... facebook is tracking you and that you've viewed that item, regardless of wether you have a facebook account or not.

      But don't bother reading the article or even the summary or anything.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    2. Re:Not that hard to kill facebook's tracking by seandiggity · · Score: 2, Informative

      ...apparently the pre-Abine version of TACO has been forked as Beef TACO, so I'm giving it a second chance on this machine...hopefully it doesn't ever get updated with the Abine crapola.

      --
      Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
  2. Plugins by mr100percent · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is why I use plugins like Defacer, which hides the iframes for Facebook and (coming soon) the other Share buttons.

    1. Re:Plugins by Anti-S · · Score: 5, Informative

      AdBlock exception rule: ||facebook.*$domain=~facebook.com|~127.0.0.1

  3. Re:Perspective, kthxbai by Faylone · · Score: 4, Informative

    Even if you're not going to read the article, could you at least read the summary? Even if you don't use Facebook, you're still being tracked.

  4. Not if you... by Posting=!Working · · Score: 5, Informative

    Add this to your Adblock Plus filter:

    ||facebook.*$domain=~facebook.com|~127.0.0.1

    What like button?
    You can still use facebook, but they're blocked from any page that isn't facebook.com.

    --
    This sentence no verb.
    1. Re:Not if you... by bassman998 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I use the following Adblock rules:

      ||fbcdn.com/*$domain=~facebook.com
      ||fbcdn.net/*$domain=~facebook.com
      ||facebook.com/*$domain=~facebook.com
      ||facebook.net/*$domain=~facebook.com

      I never see Facebook content on any site other than Facebook, and their social plugin can't track me.

  5. Re:Speak for yourself by gambino21 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I only recently discovered facebook's instant personalization "feature". I went to rottentomatoes and it showed movies that my facebook friends liked. This seems very inappropriate to me because how did rottentomatoes know who I am in facebook, without logging in or doing any kind of verification. Apparently rottentomatoes uses thirdparty cookies to fetch your facebook info and display it. This seems to mean that potentially any website can check who you are in facebook (if you are currently logged in). I was able to turn off this feature by disabling thirdparty cookies in Firefox.

    More than anything this seems like a big privacy leak and is the fault of the browsers. This should be off by default in firefox and other browsers. If I go to rottentomatoes.com, I would expect that by Firefox would only send cookies back to rottentomatoes and should not even allow read access to other cookies while I'm on that page. The same goes for flash plugins and other scripts, etc. that read cookies, they should only have read access to the cookies for the current page.

  6. Re:No surprises here by GuruBuckaroo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, many home routers use 127.0.0.1 as the Info/Config page. I think mine uses 127.0.0.2, but still...

    I hate to be negative, I really do. However, this post merely illustrates that you have absolutely no idea of what you are talking about.

    Unless your router has a monitor and keyboard attached to it, it is impossible for any machine to talk to any other machine using any address that starts with 127. These are "localhost" addresses that always, always equate to the same machine the request originates from. In other words, your workstation.

    I'm pretty sure your router actually uses something more like 192.168.0.2. Linksys routers will default to 192.168.1.1, for instance.

    --
    Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.