Facebook Reveals its Tracking Secrets

Facebook Reveals its Tracking Secrets

www.smh.com.au

Through interviews with Facebook engineering director Arturo Bejar, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes, Facebook corporate spokesman Barry Schnitt and Facebook engineering manager Gregg Stefancik, USA Today‘s Byron Acohido was able to compile the most complete picture to date of how the social network keeps tabs on its 800 million users.

(visit the link for the full news article)

this is a follow on from my thread "Facebook tracks you even after you log off"

www.abovetopsecret.com...

According to this new article Facebook are saying their cookies only track your non-facebook activity of the sites you visit have the 'link to facebook" functionality, for only 90 days

it also records details about your computer

those who don't care about their privacy are not alarmed and some are even saying this is "necessary" to ensure that internet marketing can survive

what would you say?





www.smh.com.au
(visit the link for the full news article)

some of the more relevant content of the article

Here is what Acohido learned:

Facebook doesn’t track everybody the same way.

It uses different methods for members who have signed in and are using their accounts, members who are logged-off and non-members.


The first time you arrive at any Facebook.com page, the company inserts cookies in your browser. If you sign up for an account, it inserts two types of cookies. If you don’t set up an account, it only inserts one of the two types.

These cookies record every time you visit another website that uses a Facebook Like button or other Facebook plugin — which work together with the cookies to note the time, date and website being visited. Unique characteristics that identify your computer are also recorded.

Facebook keeps logs that record your past 90 days of activity. It deletes entries older than 90 days.
If you are logged into a Facebook account, your name, email address, friends and all of the other data in your Facebook profile is also recorded.

Data about web searches and browsing habits could be used to figure out political affiliations, religious beliefs, sexual orientations or health issues about consumers.

According to USA Today, this type of correlation doesn’t seem to be happening on a wide scale, but the concern of some privacy advocates is that selling data could become a tempting business proposition — both to social networks like Facebook and online advertising players such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that similarly employ cookie tracking techniques.

enjoy

GUYS! HEY GUYS!!!

I've got this CRAZY idea to keep Facebook from intruding on your privacy. DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT!

I get the attraction to Facebook. It helps you keep in touch. Let me ask this though, if you don't care enough to write an email or call someone, are they really worth your time?

I don't belong to Facebook....could they still be tracking me anyway? Anyone know?

Theres millions of people on Facebook. They don't have the time to look through an individual's history and say "Haha, this Steve Smith guy was looking at porn. Thats hilarious." They're looking at everybody as a whole, looking for trends, as a way to get money. All they want is money, not to invade our privacy. I'm not worried about it... yet.

reply to post by Highlander64


I believe ATS tracks too.

Now, because ATS is the biggest conspiracy site on the web, you better believe TPTB at least keep a marginal eye on it................don't kid yourself.

Most sites track now.

reply to post by faint1993


I use to work with very very large amounts of data..............with the proper knowledge of how to search for something and the right software yes keeping tracks of tens of millions (or more) is possible.

You have no idea of a good system's capability.

reply to post by faint1993


'If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about!' Dangerous thinking. You really want every little thing recorded etc? Perhaps you have tamer online habits then myself (almost guaranteed). What if some jerk gets a hold of the places you've been, offhand comments you've made?

Originally posted by ofhumandescent
reply to post by Highlander64

 

I believe ATS tracks too.

Now, because ATS is the biggest conspiracy site on the web, you better believe TPTB at least keep a marginal eye on it................don't kid yourself.

Most sites track now.

Skeptic Overlord our illustrious leader discusses this in my original thread, towards the end

no ATS does not do this

Originally posted by Domo1
GUYS! HEY GUYS!!!

I've got this CRAZY idea to keep Facebook from intruding on your privacy. DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT!

I get the attraction to Facebook. It helps you keep in touch. Let me ask this though, if you don't care enough to write an email or call someone, are they really worth your time?

exactly - I dont have one but everyone in my family does, so I must be a gonner lol

From Source.

These cookies record every time you visit another website that uses a Facebook Like button or other Facebook plugin — which work together with the cookies to note the time, date and website being visited. Unique characteristics that identify your computer are also recorded. Facebook keeps logs that record your past 90 days of activity. It deletes entries older than 90 days. If you are logged into a Facebook account, your name, email address, friends and all of the other data in your Facebook profile is also recorded. Data about web searches and browsing habits could be used to figure out political affiliations, religious beliefs, sexual orientations or health issues about consumers. Read more: www.smh.com.au...

Every site you visit that has a thumbs up picture of facebook tracks your visit to the page. As well as internet searches.

I deleted my facebook a month ago, I went through withdrawls for a couple days, then it all felt ok after a while.

Facebook is not the only company doing this. Think more like, which icon are you seeing on every website, and that is your answer.

Also, clean your cookies daily at least. Just to put a small wrench in it.

i deleted my account months ago, you just made me think to check my cookies.. I still had facebook ones.

reply to post by Highlander64


I do not like being followed; I do not like being invaded; I do not like tracking cookies. I just do not like them.

I especially do not like the kind that sneak into the shadows when I clear my cache and clean out trackers, and hide, and then come back when I open my browser.

I do not like them Sam-I-Am.

reply to post by ofhumandescent


Skeptic Overlord I'm gonna just go ahead and ask that you not publish my odd sexual proclivities... I know they may seem 'weird' or 'scary' to common folk, but after awhile you get used to wearing all that rubber. Wait... WHAT!?

reply to post by caladonea


I will only tell you if you give me a source for avatar picture because that woman drives me crazy! I can't figure out how to make that sexy spanish 'r' growling noise via text.

I don't think they can track you if you don't have an account. You're safe my NW brother.

Originally posted by faint1993
Theres millions of people on Facebook. They don't have the time to look through an individual's history and say "Haha, this Steve Smith guy was looking at porn. Thats hilarious." They're looking at everybody as a whole, looking for trends, as a way to get money. All they want is money, not to invade our privacy. I'm not worried about it... yet.

hmmmm

well, you may be interested in how the Nazis developed their own computer tracking system on their 55 million population in 1933 with the help of IBM

I am in no way being alarmist but I do have a keen sense of history and 'old tricks are the best tricks"

On April 12, 1933, the German government announced the plans to immediately conduct a long-delayed national census.

The project was particularly important to the Nazis as a mechanism for the identification of Jews, Gypsies, and other ethnic groups deemed undesirable by the regime. Dehomag offered to actively assist the German government in its task of ethnic identification, concentrating first upon the 41 million residents of Prussia

This activity was not only countenanced by Thomas Watson and IBM in America, Black argues, but was actively encouraged and financially supported, with Watson himself traveling to Germany in October 1933 and the company ramping up its investment in its German subsidiary from 400,000 to 7,000,000 reichsmarks — about $1 million.

This injection of American capital allowed Dehomag to purchase land in Berlin and to construct IBM's first factory in Germany, Black charges, thereby "tooling up for what it correctly saw as a massive financial relationship with the Hitler regime."

Black also asserts that a "secret deal" was made between Heidinger and Watson during the latter's visit to Germany which allowed Dehomag commercial powers outside of Germany, enabling the "now Nazified" company to "circumvent and supplant" various national subsidiaries and licensees by "soliciting and delivering punch card solution technology directly to IBM customers in those territories." As a result, Nazi Germany soon became the second most important customer of IBM after the lucrative US market, Black notes.

Holocaust implicationsThe 1933 census, with design help and tabulation services provided by IBM through its German subsidiary, proved to be pivotal to the Nazis in their efforts to identify, isolate, and ultimately destroy the country's Jewish minority. Black describes the situation faced by German Jews:

en.wikipedia.org...

Nearly all websites do this.

Tracking cookies is nothing new...

Oh, it's already way worse than you can imagine. Even if you are not on facebook, there are other people you know on there, putting up pictures with you in them and tagging you.

With Carnegie Mellon's cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person's online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it's a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website (where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously) with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities.

But it gets even worse. In less than a minute, they can figure out what size shoes you are wearing, the length of your, well, you get the picture:

We use the term augmented reality in a slightly extended sense, to refer to the merging of online and offline data that new technologies make possible. If an individual's face in the street can be identified using a face recognizer and identified images from social network sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn, then it becomes possible not just to identify that individual, but also to infer additional, and more sensitive, information about her, once her name has been (probabilistically) inferred.

In our third experiment, as a proof-of-concept, we predicted the interests and Social Security numbers of some of the participants in the second experiment. We did so by combining face recognition with the algorithms we developed in 2009 to predict SSNs from public data. SSNs were nothing more than one example of what is possible to predict about a person: conceptually, the goal of Experiment 3 was to show that it is possible to start from an anonymous face in the street, and end up with very sensitive information about that person, in a process of data "accretion." In the context of our experiment, it is this blending of online and offline data - made possible by the convergence of face recognition, social networks, data mining, and cloud computing - that we refer to as augmented reality.

It's WAY beyond what you are squawking about.

www.theatlantic.com...

mmmmm Facebook cookies just in time for the Holidays, I think i'll make a few more to take to Grandma's.

Seriously though, I'm not worried. How many times have we heard the same lines here. This Ip is tracking you, this website has your info, NEWS at 11.

Of course they track the user's preferences to generate ads to put on the members sidebar so they click on it and make some more money.

Wouldnt you?