Friday, September 18, 2015

Facebook “Like” Button Tracking

Kashmir Hill (tweet):

Four years ago, Facebook promised that the “Like” buttons that had sprung up on non-Facebook sites all around the web wouldn’t be used to track users. In 2011, Facebook said, “No information we receive when you see social plugins is used to target ads; we delete or anonymize this information within 90 days, and we never sell your information.”

[…]

Now, every time you visit a site or use an app that has a Facebook “Like” or “Share” button, data about your visit will be captured and fed into Facebook’s advertising algorithm, even if you don’t actually click on the buttons. Millions of sites use Facebook’s off-site buttons, including many popular news sites, e-commerce sites, and, yes, adult entertainment sites.

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There was a 2-click privacy project of the german website heise.de (http://www.heise.de/extras/socialshareprivacy/).
An english fork can be found at: http://panzi.github.io/SocialSharePrivacy/

The idea is that you first enable the share-button and only then the share button is added to the website, which improves privacy.

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