Slashdot Mirror
Facebook's 'Like This' Button Is Tracking You
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."
Meh, facebook is just connective tissue; grey matter. I don't really use it all that differently from twitter... actually most of my FB posts come from twitter.
The real content gets posted to Slashdot, LiveJournal, Blogspot, Flickr, Picasa, Youtube, etc., sometimes even Buzz. Twitter / FB are just open / closed syndication engines for that content, sort of like a consolidated form of RSS with some extra integration features.
Relevant to the actual subject, StumbleUpon has always provided a much better "Like" button... since it includes a "don't like" button and actually does something useful with the information you provide by giving you more random links that you would probably like based on what you have in common with the other people who liked that link.
Strangely, I have no desire to share this StumbleUpon "like" information with the rest of my IRL friends on FB / twitter, partly because our pr0n tastes can be quite different, but in general I just don't care to share links as a feed. If there's an article someone should read, I send them a directed email. If I find something funny, I might go so far as to post it to our IRC channel.
Come to think of it, I think FB / Twitter might just be some sort of gap filler for people who don't lurk on IRC.
It's trivial to block this -- just add a batch file nofb.bat that replaces your host file with the one that has facebook redirected to 127.0.0.1. If you use fb and wish to actually go there, you can have another bat file, gofb.bat which changes host file back to the one with facebook entry commented out (the bat file may call a little executable that flushes local DNS cache on your machine by resolving the affected domain name). In general case, if you wish to do this selectively for n tracking sites, with n>1, you will need one bat file that blocks all of them and one for each site that has just one site site unblocked, hence you need n+1 bat files. Also, going to any of the tracking sites to use their services will also cost you an extra click for in and out.
Note that google, digg and many others are doing the same kind of tracking, whether you subscribe to their site or not. You get ID on their servers attached to your cookies, tracking your visits anywhere where their bug is placed. That way they can sell to some site A which you are visiting now the fact that you have also visited sites B, C, D, ... earlier (when and how many times each, what kind of content you used there, etc). Of course, if the tracking servers know who you are, they can also sell that info to sites A, B, C..., at a higher price.