Facebook Confirms New Cookie-Tracking Issue
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook is once again setting its datr cookie via the Like button and other social plugins on third-party websites. The datr cookie can be used for tracking users whether you are logged in or logged out of the service. Facebook has confirmed this is indeed a bug, but says that it is limited in scope and that it will be fixed today. Talk about damage control."
has already passed, since TFA (3rd link) was from yesterday.
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This is a bug. Right!!
The web generally works fine if you only accept 1st party cookies, not 3rd party cookies. There's pretty much zero reason to accept cookies from other than the main site you are visiting, and firefox has long had an easy preference setting to do just that. It's one of the basic "setting up a new machine" tasks that people should be used to doing by now. Don't run 3rd party javascript, don't allow 3rd party cookies - that alone increases your privacy and safety by a huge amount. I've almost never seen anything break like that, and if some rare thing does, it was badly written anyway and needs to have people putting pressure on it to stop doing that.
Block facebook.com and fbcdn.com, then add exceptions for the two sites when visting facebook.com. Problem solved, no more fb tracking.
Not sure I trust em. Not that I ever did. If a company has income, but does not charge their users anything. Then their users are their products, and are being sold to someone else.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If only there were a competitor to facebook that addressed these issues. I'm sure they'd be able to take a large portion of facebook's sub base about as quickly as facebook did to myspace.
And if only said competitor could somehow make such a service work with it's other internal services that paying customers are currently locked out of.
Talk about a market ripe for take over, if only someone could get their act together.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
There's a reason I never visit Facebook outside of Sandboxie...
I run Facebook in a totally separate browser than I use for -everything else-. So why is it I still get Facebook cookies in a browser that has never logged onto Facebook? I remove those cookies about 2-3 times/week. I haven't figured out where they're coming from (i.e. what site puts them there) yet. This is not new behavior, I've seen this for months.
Sharemenot
Not having an account with them and blocking everything from their domains is what I chose to do.
If FB is a country, then FB is a communist country. They don't let their users export data to Google+, and they want to track their users everywhere they can. To me, FB is a communist!
If I walk into a Best Buy, does that give them the right to follow me into other stores? Why is this legal, I do not know. What will it take to get Facebook in court for this?
Isn't this defeated by simply disabling third party cookies in your browser?
The disconnect addon for Firefox seems to be working well for me.
Given Mark Zuckerberg's numerous comments about eliminating privacy and how Facebook has so many 'bugs' that end up eliminating privacy, I thought they would call it an 'undisclosed feature' that provides vital benefits to the operation of Facebook, and that they chose to make it undisclosed to ensure it could work to maximum effectiveness... Because 'ignorant' or 'misinformed' users might object or block it.
Devote it exclusively to Facebook. I downloaded Opera.
Write a greasemonkey script to write the cookie over with, say, Zuckerberg's profile ID? So everywhere you go tracks to his profile (but not tied to you)
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
... Facebook's development is out of control, that Facebook does not even know what its developers are doing. Or maybe the developers are doing exactly what Facebook wants, and Facebook thinks the public is too stupid to figure it out.
So instead of the ol' chliche "its not a bug, its a feature!" , we get to see "its not a feature, its a bug!"
Once it's fixed, it won't be limited in scope anymore.
What I'd like to see is a protocol for handling all the social interactions that Facebook provides. Then folks could write apps and servers to implement it. Technically-minded nerds could run their own servers. Other folks could just choose whichever provider they pleased, much like selecting mail or web hosting.
Decentralize.
How the hell does a TEXT FILE track you?!?!?
Did I not in fact tell everyone this a few days ago? See! No one believes me! :) :) :)
...but says that it is limited in scope and that it will be fixed today... to expand the scope globally
Does this mean both distros adobted Unity? I don't like that on my desktop computer. Only good idea for use with laptops or smaller.
How about the latest Facebook tracking option. It's called ALLforALL: 10:50:09: Breathed in. 10:50:14: Breathed out. 10:50:24: Noticed cat sleeping on chair. 10:50:32: Wind stirring leaves outside house. Temp 71 degrees. 10:51:02: Sun came out from behind cloud. 10:51:12: Had dalliance with Greek heiress 10:51:34: Cleared throat. 10:51:49: Rear section of Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) just crashed through house. 10:52:59: Cat now awake. 10:53:17: Thirsty. --from Thinking Out Loud, http://marperl.blogspot.com/
Here's a few good browsers,
Iron portable
Opera portable (called Opera USB)
Palemoon portable (a faster Firefox)
TorBrowser is also portable, but less functional.