Everyone is buzzing about the changes that will soon take over Facebook, and now that we know it’s going to remain free, there’s a new concern–privacy.
Under the new Facebook, third-party apps will now be fully integrated into a user’s profile page. Now, when you use an app, updates about your activity will automatically appear on your page, whether you like it or not.
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“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,” developer Nik Cubrilovic pointed out in a blogpost Sunday night.
Cubrilovic, a hacker himself, also said that even when you log out of Facebook, the website can still track your online movements.
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.
He concludes, “This is not what ‘logout’ is supposed to mean – Facebook are only altering the state of the cookies instead of removing all of them when a user logs out.
Facebook engineer Gregg Stefancik quickly posted a comment denying the claim that the social media network is out to track people.
Generally, unlike other major Internet companies, we have no interest in tracking people. We don’t have an ad network and we don’t sell people’s information. As we state in our help center “We do not share or sell the information we see when you visit a website with a Facebook social plugin to third parties and we do not use it to deliver ads to you.”
Said more plainly, our cookies aren’t used for tracking. They just aren’t. Instead, we use our cookies to either provide custom content (e.g. your friend’s likes within a social plugin), help improve or maintain our service (e.g. measuring click-through rates to help optimize performance), or protect our users and our service (e.g. defending denial of service attacks or requiring a second authentication factor for a login from a suspicious location).
Who do you believe? Does this change your opinion of the new Facebook?
