Facebook Admits To Tracking Users’ Online Activity

Facebook users are sharing more than they bargained for, thanks to the “Like” button now being featured on other websites.

But the sharing doesn’t end when users leave the site.

Earlier this week, Facebook admitted to tracking users’ web activity outside of the social networking site through cookies.

“It’s kind of scary, actually. Because, you know, nowadays we have no privacy, ” said Facebook user David Marek.

The cookies, which are used to personalize web pages and track web behavior for advertising, normally stop giving information after a user leaves the website. But the cookies Facebook uses keep sending data, even after a user logs out.

According to Facebook, the cookies are used to help improve security for logging in and out of the site.

And thanks to a new feature that displays a Facebook “Like” button to other websites, even more information of where users surf is collected.

“This new change that they have done with the ‘Like’ button is ultimately tracking you — not when you like it, but just when it’s on a page,” said web specialist Adrian Medina.

More than 900,000 web pages have the “Like” buttons on them already. Pages that have integrated Facebook send information about where users are surfing, even if they never hit the ”Like” button.

These buttons can be found on all types of websites, from shopping and news pages to porn sites.

Even with the additional tracking and privacy issues, many people will continue to use Facebook.

Here are a few tips to help keep online activity private:

Always log out of Facebook after every session. Even though this doesn’t stop all cookies from tracking your web behavior, it eliminates most of them.

Users will also need to manually delete Facebook cookies after every session. Every web browser has a different way of doing this. Click here for a step-by-step process on how this is done.

Another defense is to use a separate web browser, such as Google Chrome or Firefox, for Facebook activity. This separates the information on one browser from being shared with the other.

There are also downloadable programs such as Facebook Blocker that protect a browser from online tracking. Users can download the program for free at this website.