Facebook have boggled everybody’s minds in the last two weeks with their heaps-dramatic facelift, but while all that was going on, nobody actually took a look under the hood. Except Nik Cubrilovic, that is.
An Aussie programmer, entrepeneur and hacker who has previously worked for TechCrunch, Cubrilovic decided to check out what happens when you log out of Facebook from the back-end. Specifically, he looked into their use of cookies, which in plain English are a nifty little pieces of code that send information to and from your browser via Facebook itself. It’s the kind of thing that means you can ‘Like’ articles and videos on other sites and it will feed straight back into your account, even if you’ve logged out. But it also means that you’re being tracked and your information is being gathered long after you technically consented to it happening. It’s basically like online chlamydia.
Nik examined the reach of these cookies, particularly one called ‘a_user’ which followed a standard logged-out Facebook user across the web, collecting information all the way until the browser was closed entirely. When he first reported this on Sunday, Facebook denied that they tracked users across the web, but backtracked yesterday and actually deleted the cookie entirely. That’s a big deal for a company who have been frequently criticised for being impervious to regular rules and unwilling to co-operate with traditional authorities including government and police. Win for the little guy and inadvertent web-STD carriers everywhere.
The best way to avoid Facebook knowing that you spend most of your day looking for a new job while at your old job/researching new haircuts/downloading Spice Girls torrents is to use something like disconnect.me, which severs you from web trackers and allows you to use social networks without them affecting your sex life. Sorry, we meant social life. Definitely social life.
via Gawker.
