So just a few days after my rant about Facebook I was going through Norwegian webpages to get an update of what interests the newspapers of the country.
At the top of one of the biggest ones were an article about how Facebook monitors you even after you’ve logged out of your account.
Moootherf*biiiiiiiip*
Since I’m not quite terrified enough or maybe because I lack the skill to do much investigation on my own, I’m really happy that there are people like Nik Cubrilovic. He is an Australian man who describes himself (on his blog) as an entrepeneur, hacker and writer. Maybe he’ll be able to teach me some helpful stuff? Who knows, anyhow (is that even a word?) I found his blog very helpful on this given subject.
“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.” see more
Another page which was more related to the subject I brought up in the previous post about Facebook gave a better description of how they manage to monitor our moves online.
I’m sure most of us have seen those small facebook/tumblr/twitter and other sorts of social widgets that allows you to post the article or product on the given platform. I’m think I even have it on my blog. These widgets allows you to quickly and easily repost something you found interesting and want to share, and seem pretty harmless.
In The Wall Street Journal Amir Efrati writes that when you press these buttons it is not just a fun tool to share pages with your friends, it also allows the makers collect data about the different pages you are visiting.
“These so-called social widgets, which appear atop stories on news sites or alongside products on retail sites, notify Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don’t click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal.” more here
It appears that in order for this to work, the person must have logged in to Facebook only once in the past month. I’m sure I’m not alone to about visiting Facebook almost every day, which means that most of us are leaving quite a solid trail after us around the internet.
And for those of you who doesn’t have Facebook:
“But Facebook says it still places a cookie on the computer of anyone who visits the Facebook.com home page, even if the user isn’t a member. Mr. Taylor says Facebook uses such cookies to protect the site from cyberattacks by people who try to break in to users’ accounts, among other things.”
Yeah so yeah.. I don’t think I’ll delete my account yet, but I will keep an eye out to see if commercials “perfectly suited” for me appears.. This is what I could find right now.
