Facebook wants you. Well you and everything about you. Information is crucial these days, because information is the new currency. In his recent keynote at Facebook’s F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg talked about how the company is implementing “frictionless” sharing. Though, “frictionless” isn’t exactly the best word choice.
By frictionless, Zuckerberg means that users don’t need to actively like something in order to share it on their walls and news feed, Instead by simply vising a site or app that integrates with Facebook, user’s actions are now tracked and reported back our friends via the new Facebook Timeline. If this was at least a remotely smart idea it’d be applauded, but it’s with moves like this that Facebook continues to destroy the Internet. The whole point of liking and sharing is the idea of curating. By just posting everything a user does or looks at Facebook will signal the end of curating.
Winer, a technologist and more or less the godfather of RSS, writes, Facebook is Scaring Me:
People joke that privacy is over, but I don’t think they imagined that the disclosures would be so proactive. [Facebook is] seeking out information to report about you. That’s different from showing people a picture that you posted yourself. If this were the government we’d be talking about the Fourth Amendment.
And the moral of the story is:
Make sure you log out of Facebook when you’re done visiting the site. Even that can’t save you though. Facebook, it seems, maintains relatively persistent cookies in your browser. All the better to track you with:
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 [that integrates with Facebook] you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions.
Related Posts:
GREATeclectic aka Kendrick Daye is a DJ, artist and the Editor of Art Nouveau Magazine. As a freelance journalist and photographer his work has been featured in the NY Times Magazine, Ebony Magazine, Upscale Magazine, Creative Loafing, Honeymag.com & Yo-Raps.com.
