Facebook is tracking your activity even after you log off

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Apparently these days Facebook is the one getting more Sociable and less Nice!

An Australian blogger Nic Cubrilovic discovered and exposed the huge privacy breach that Facebook tracks down your activity even after you log out of your account.

So even if you had log out of Facebook, whenever you visit any of the million web pages that has a Facebook Like Button or any other widget from them,  the information, including your (unique) account ID, is still being sent to Facebook!

Cubrilovic, also said that he has been trying to alert Facebook about this findings for almost a year, but received little or no response from the company. Big surprise, hm?!

Of course Facebook has denied allegations, claiming in an official comment that “Facebook does not track users across the web. Instead, we use cookies on social plugins to personalize content (e.g. Show you what your friends liked), to help maintain and improve what we do or for safety and security.”

So apparently they do that not to “track” your actions, they just do it to “personalize” your content!

Doesn’t this look strangely familiar?  Like what Bill Clinton said a while back: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman!“.  Of course not, it was just a.. blow job ;)

There already are 5 recorded lawsuits for tracking logged-out users and several officials and advocacy groups are apparently getting ready to strike as well. If the courts will rule in their favor it’s gonna be a hell of a sting up Zuckerberg‘s proverbial butt.

The starting point for this discovery was a brand new Facebook feature, that I actually saw in action, the new automatic “frictionless sharing“. This means sharing your non-Facebook web activity with your Facebook friends BUT without your explicit permission. As I saw the other day live, and

As you may see I was watching a movie on Dailymotion, and it was automatically posted on the Facebook news ticker. Yeah, creepy as hell!  All you have to do is view an article, play a video and not pay to much attention to the privacy settings for this feature, and voilà, everything you do shows up on Facebook.

What does this mean to you?! Well if  ”cookie removal” sounds a bit too techie for you than make sure you go to a public internet cafe or use a friend’s computer while looking up hemorrhoid treatments or performance enhancements, otherwise your Facebook friends might have a bit of a field day (on your ass of course)!

And I’d like to end with a funny quote I read the other day: “Deleting my internet history feels like I never stalked you in the first place!”   Now you don’t even need to do that, Facebook does all that heavy lifting for you ;)

Soo.. now get ready (with a tinny bit of help from dear old Facebook of course) to share “everything” with the rest of the online social world!