Facebook users have been concerned about privacy for more than a year now, but Wollongong technologist Nik Cubrilovic made situation go worse for Facebook with a claim that the social networking giant was tracking the websites its users visit, even when they log out of Facebook.
Cubrilovic revealed that once a user logs out of Facebook, Facebook should delete its tracking cookies, which are only modified by Facebook. This leads to maintaining account information and other unique tokens that can be used to identify a user.
This would mean that after logging out of Facebook if one visits a web page having any button or widget of Facebook, one’s browser still continues to send details related to one’s movement to Facebook. Cubrilovic wrote in a blog post, “Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit.” He even had a solution to this problem, which can be opted by the users to be safe from Facebook tracking, when they log out of Facebook. He said that users should delete every Facebook cookie from their browser once they log out of Facebook, or one can even use a separate browser for Facebook interactions.
Cubrilovic, for his working has been working on a new unnamed startup. His past experiences have been with large technology blog TechCrunch and online storage company Omnidrive. He is even a self proclaimed hacker. Cubrilovic said that he had detailed technical information to back up his claim against the social networking giant. Later on, even technology news sites all over the world had picked up that news and a response for the same was being awaited from Facebook.
Facebook spokesperson had a lot to say for the same, wherein the findings were kind off appreciated, but the main claim was denied. However, he did not offer an official statement. Instead he pointed out to a post where Facebook engineer Arturo Bejar had detailed a few points, which is as under:
I am a Facebook engineer that works on these systems and I wanted to say that the logged out cookies are used for safety and protection including: identifying spammers and phishers, detecting when somebody unauthorized is trying to access your account, helping you get back into your account if you get hacked, disabling registration for a under-age users who try to re-register with a different birthdate, powering account security features such as 2nd factor login approvals and notification, and identifying shared computers to discourage the use of “keep me logged in.”
Also please know that also when you’re logged in (or out) we don’t use our cookies to track you on social plugins to target ads or sell your information to third parties. I’ve heard from so many that what we do is to share or sell your data, and that is just not true. We use your logged in cookies to personalize (show you what your friends liked), to help maintain and improve what we do, or for safety and protection.
However, an official statement is still awaited from Facebook.
Talking about Facebook’s Timeline, there were concerns related to over-sharing. As Timeline chronologically arranges the occasions and instances of a user’s life. This includes sharing memories which can be read out, heard and one watches them in real time. The early birdy users of Timeline even noted that there is a feature in it which displays a list of one’s friends who have removed them from their lists.