Facebook tracks you even when you are logged out

[Lunican]

Logging out of Facebook is not enough

25th September 2011 #
Dave Winer wrote a timely piece this morning about how Facebook is scaring him since the new API allows applications to post status items to your Facebook timeline without a users intervention. It is an extension of Facebook Instant and they call it frictionless sharing. The privacy concern here is that because you no longer have to explicitly opt-in to share an item, you may accidentally share a page or an event that you did not intend others to see.

The advice is to log out of Facebook. But logging out of Facebook only de-authorizes your browser from the web application, a number of cookies (including your account number) are still sent along to all requests to facebook.com. Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions.

There are serious implications if you are using Facebook from a public terminal. If you login on a public terminal and then hit 'logout', you are still leaving behind fingerprints of having been logged in. As far as I can tell, these fingerprints remain (in the form of cookies) until somebody explicitly deletes all the Facebook cookies for that browser. Associating an account ID with a real name is easy - as the same ID is used to identify your profile.

Facebook knows every account that has accessed Facebook from every browser and is using that information to suggest friends to you. The strength of the 'same machine' value in the algorithm that works out friends to suggest may be low, but it still happens. This is also easy to test and verify.

Full Article:
http://nikcub.appspot.com/logging-out-of-facebook-is-not-enough

[buckethead]

Unless you don't have an account.

[duvaldude08]

Facebook also holds ur personal information hostage. The fact that you can not permanently delete an account is scary to me. You can only "deactivate"...... That is why my personal business is NOT on there.

[thekillingwax]

You can delete it, I did it a couple of years ago but it's not an option they publicly acknowledge. Oddly enough, the best place for info on it is in fact a facebook group about it: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703 Make sure you do like they suggest and clear your cookies out because there are so many sites that hook into your facebook account now.

[Garden guy]

I woner if anyone has ever sued facebook for not erasing someone or for selling personal information....if there is no way of erasing your information because they won't allow...is'nt that thievery? or because it's free  are they feeling that they can do whatever they want?

[ChriswUfGator]

I woner if anyone has ever sued facebook for not erasing someone or for selling personal information....if there is no way of erasing your information because they won't allow...is'nt that thievery? or because it's free  are they feeling that they can do whatever they want?

If it's contained in the user agreement, then the choice is generally to accept the agreement or not use the service. Unfortunately, that's the lay of the land when it comes to these onerous corporate privacy policies, and it's likely to stay that way unless congress decides to do something about it.

[Doctor_K]

Unless you don't have an account.

+1

[Lunican]

Unless you don't have an account.

This may not even be enough. Your friends may provide info about you by uploading their contact lists or send you an email from facebook.

If you sign up for an account you will probably be shown a list of people you know.

[Lunican]

From today's Wall Street Journal article about this topic:

And earlier this year, Facebook discontinued the practice of obtaining browsing data about Internet users who had never visited Facebook.com, after it was disclosed by Dutch researcher Arnold Roosendaal.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/09/26/facebook-defends-getting-data-from-logged-out-users/

So they were collecting data from people that had never even signed up for facebook through the like button network.

[Overstreet]

For example, your family loads pictures of you and tags them with your name.