Facebook Confirms New Cookie-Tracking Issue

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Facebook Confirms New Cookie-Tracking Issue

Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 5, 2011 @05:15AM from the issue-is-such-a-nice-bland-word dept.

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."

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And of course "today" by bwintx · 2011-10-05 05:19 · Score: 2

has already passed, since TFA (3rd link) was from yesterday.

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good to disabled 3rd party cookies anyway by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-05 05:22 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.
Adblock by Nursie · 2011-10-05 05:23 · Score: 2

Block facebook.com and fbcdn.com, then add exceptions for the two sites when visting facebook.com. Problem solved, no more fb tracking.
1. Re:Adblock by _0xd0ad · 2011-10-05 05:38 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Here's my list.
  ||facebook.com^$third-party,domain=~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
  ||facebook.net^$third-party,domain=~facebook.com|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
  ||fbcdn.com^$third-party,domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.net
  ||fbcdn.net^$third-party,domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com
  A few more domain exceptions on my home FF installation to permit certain Facebook Apps to work correctly.
2. Re:Adblock by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-05 05:47 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  ghostery... google it.
If only there were a competitor by grasshoppa · 2011-10-05 05:25 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

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Re:Bullshit... by Jeremiah+Cornelius · 2011-10-05 05:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

This IS a bug. As in "I think this phone is bugged".

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Re:Bullshit... by ArhcAngel · 2011-10-05 05:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

It is a bug to Facebook as in oops they can still tell we are doing it.

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Fake it out by EkriirkE · 2011-10-05 06:50 · Score: 2

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)

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Re:So they requested a patent on a "bug"? by surmak · 2011-10-05 08:03 · Score: 2

Maybe, they requested the patent on the bug to insure that nobody else can invade users' privacy. (Yeah right, I don't believe that either.)