Facebook tracks your Web surfing

5/28/2011

Facebook is an online powerhouse. Many sites rely on the site to promote their content. That's why many sites add a Facebook "Like" button beside stories. You can click the button to share the story with your family and friends.

Unfortunately, this convenience comes at a price. Facebook's "Like" button is known as a smart widget. Facebook can use it to track your online movements as you go from site to site.

Widgets are little programs embedded in websites or computer desktops. They're used to add a specific function. For example, a weather widget will tell you the weather. There are stock market widgets, calendar widgets and so forth.

On websites, widgets typically link to other sites. For instance, most sites have a sharing widget. This lets you easily share interesting content with friends. I even have one on my site. It's a red bar at the top of the screen. Don't worry, though, it isn't tracking you.

Facebook, Twitter and Google decided to go a step further, however. They created "smart" widgets. It's like in those movies where they make a gun-toting robot "smart." It just sounds like a bad idea.

The most common smart widget is Facebook's "Like" button. It's a faster form of sharing content with your Facebook friends. However, Facebook created another website widget as well.

You've seen this one around, I'm sure. It tells you which of your friends visited or liked an article. That's so you know your friends have been to the same page. It's the "social" part of social networking.

Plus, it sounds harmless enough. There's just one problem. To know who your friends are, Facebook has to know who is visiting the site. It also has to know what site you're on.

So, Facebook has to be tracking you and the pages you visit. Twitter and Google have similar systems. It's just how the widgets have to work. 

How widespread is this? Well, some analysts did a test. Of the top 1,000 popular websites, more than 300 sites reported to Facebook. More than 200 reported to Google and 200 to Twitter.

Of course, these sites say they don't use this data. Data is made anonymous so they can't pull your browsing history, for instance. Facebook claims it deletes the data within 90 days and Google within two weeks.

Facebook also says that no data is given to advertisers. That is, unless you actually click a "Like" button. However, it doesn't give out all your browsing data. That's something, I guess.

It doesn't mean the companies couldn't change their policies in the future. They could easily build up a record of your Web surfing. It would be invaluable to advertisers to know all about your life. So, what can you do about it?

Well, first of all, you can log out of Facebook. Facebook can keep you logged in for a month. Closing your browser doesn't log you out of Facebook. To log out of Facebook, you have to actually click Account>>Log Out. The same goes for your Google Account. That will keep them from tracking you.

Facebook also lets you turn off personalization. This is what communicates personal information to widgets. If it's off, Facebook doesn't really need to track you.

You can turn off the personalization in your Facebook account settings. Go to Account>>Privacy Settings. Then at the bottom under Applications and Websites, click Edit Your Settings.

Go to Instant Personalization and click Edit Settings. Here you can turn off Instant Personalization. This also keeps third-party sites from getting your private account information.

Note that third-party sites can still access any information you have set to Public. Learn how to set your privacy settings to avoid this.

Finally, you can block smart widgets directly. But you will need to be running either Firefox or Chrome. Some of these techniques also work for Safari.

For Firefox, Chrome and Safari, you can download theDisconnect extension. This was actually developed by a former Google engineer. It is designed specifically to block social network communication with third-party sites. It catches Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Twitter and more.

However, sometimes you want communication to occur. You might want to watch a Facebook-hosted video, for example. Fortunately, Disconnect adds an icon to your browser. It lets you manage blocked widgets for every site.

There are other extensions you can try as well. There's the Facebook Blocker extension for Firefox, Chrome and Safari. It will block Facebook content on third-party Websites.

In Chrome, you can also use WidgetBlock. This will disable all social widgets on Websites. That includes Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and many others.

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