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."
This is nothing new. We've all known this.
I'm not a doctoral candidate, and I could have told you that.
Facebook's primary objective is data collection and selling it to marketers. It's kind of what they do.
Facebook is actually using personal data and information which its collecting for me... in order to make profits? Facebook is tracking me in order to learn more about me?
Who would have thought that an innocent company like Facebook, with no privacy issues ever - would stoop to that?
I am shocked! This internet thing is so new to me.
Facebook's 'Like This' Button Is Tracking You
I now feel I have the courage to speak out about what happened one month ago.
I was walking home from a late night shift and noticed a glassy aero blue vehicle drive by me slowly. I couldn't see inside through the blue glass reflection but the vehicle moved at an ominous pace. I quickened my pace and made hast for my house now only five blocks away. I broke into a run at four blocks, I was so close to home and safety. But I heard the squeal of tires on pavement behind me and my pulse spiked. I covered the next two blocks as fast as the wind but the blue vehicle was faster. It pulled up onto my lawn in front of me and the doors opened as I ran by it. I didn't look, I couldn't look at them but I heard pixelated fingers running through the grass as I scrambled to find the key to open my front door.
I opened the door and turned around to slam it shut but there was a blocky thumb that caused it to bounce back. My wife came in to see what the commotion was about and screamed as the first hand with its blue cuff and erect them grabbed my ankle and tripped me. "Get the children to the panic room" I screamed. And in ten seconds my family was safe but I still grappled with the blue shaded hand holding me down mercilessly as three more hands with blue cuffs came in through the open door. Another held down my other ankle as the third raised his cuff to expose his fully erect thumb. The fourth pulled my pants down and I screamed in agony as I was viciously sodomized in my own living room while my family watched from the panic room camera. For hours it went on while the fourth Facebook 'Like' hand sat their smoking a cigar, laughing and rubbing his thumb and forefinger together when I asked why they were doing this to me. Why? Again, they rubbed their thumbs together with their fingers signifying money.
The police said I was powerless, I had given up my right when I had clicked through the Terms of Service to join Facebook. Zuckface could do whatever he wanted to do to me and I was powerless. The policemen told me to go back to my Farmville and watch my crops and just be happy the 'like' hands had left me alive, at least the Zuck had shown some mercy. Then they excused themselves and cautiously walked out to their squad car, hands ready on their sidearms, alert for any remaining 'like' hands.
It happened to me and it could happen to you.
My work here is dung.
And that is why we like Add Block Plus. Not only does it protect some of your privacy, it also speeds up your page loading.
Noscript, Taco with Abine, BetterPrivacy.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
This is why I use plugins like Defacer, which hides the iframes for Facebook and (coming soon) the other Share buttons.
The beacon is back, and better than ever.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
You have a website that has pictures of you, your current whereabouts, mood, who you like, where you live, work, sleep, and every interaction with anyone else has just as much information pulled out and sorted. And you're bothered by the Like this button?!
You seem to be a Facebook user; I am not. If Facebook is tracking me anyway, then yes, I am bothered.
Palm trees and 8
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.
The problem is that it is tracking ME. Someone who has NEVER had and NEVER WILL HAVE a facebook account, because I visit some random companies website and they have that retarded Like It button.
This has nothing to do with tracking facebook users, it has to do with tracking EVERYONE regardless of their facebook account, or lack of one.
In reality though, its no different than any other web tracker, except now instead of using 1 pixel sized transparent GIFs, they put a visible button on the page.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Thanks for the story. Now I won't be able to sleep tonight.
There, there, fellow victim, I have a method to help you with this problem. Lay on your bed, look at your hand, now back to me, now back at your hand, now back to me. Sadly, your hand cannot stop the 'Like This' button, but if you stopped using Facebook and switched to Diaspora, you could avoid the blue terror like me. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a cloud with only about five hundred other users. What’s in your hand, back at me. I have it, it’s your mouse connected to your computer where you just need to enter your password one final time to leave Facebook. Look again, the mouse is now diamonds. Anything is possible when you're not promoting Facebook. I’m on a butterfly.
My work here is dung.
First, we dont really know they make any use of this data. They have the possibility, but they dont have to use it (its quite likely they do, but thats a different matter) Second, to avoid sending this data they would have to either limit some functionality or go out of their way and create some special domains to avoid passing the cookies between the systems. And this would be for no gain for them whatsoever - "not stealing" personal information is never a news topic. Also the only people who actually can be "offended" by this are some geeks that, lets be honest, are not an important market part to them, IMO the most realistic scenario for this is accidental data collection. They started partnering with whomever they could and putting their logo button there just to bring more traffic to their site (and their ads). PERHAPS then someone noticed that they can make also use of this extra data they get.
Why is there a "Share this on Facebook" button at the end of TFA?
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
Facebook knows a lot about me: that I have no friends, no interests, and log in between the hours of 1 and 5AM from my mother's basement. I keep getting advertisements from Slashdot and World of Warcraft.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
Noscript and "no cookies" are a start, but there's been plenty of evidence that the marketers are starting to dig even deeper than that. For example, linking all of the pages you visit (on their ad network) via IP address and Flash cookies.
And so many sites are using Javascript for the simplest things (like displaying images) and benefit from logons (Slashdot included) that it's really hard to just surf anonymously like we did 15 years ago.
I can only imagine that this is going to get much, much worse before it gets better.
I'm not missing it at all, I'm just not seeing it. There is a difference.
*laugh* I am old enough, and curmudgeonly enough, that there are certain parts of the zeitgeist I just don't give a damn about.
Heck, I still don't get this whole showing your underpants thing that started about a decade ago, I sure as hell don't want to hear about Survivor or Justin Beaver any more than I need to. Facebook and almost anything to do with Fox? Completely out.
If I ignore them long enough, emo kids and the continuing popularity of the 80's will just simply go away. Baseball, however, won't go away no matter how much I try. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.