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The social net­work Face­book admits that it uses file trac­ers, even for peo­ple who are dis­con­nected from their plat­forms, and will not change their habits.

With the help of Face­book engi­neer Arturo Bejar, an arti­cle enti­tled “Face­book track­ing is under scrutiny” on the USA Today web­site reveals details of how mem­bers are tracked on the social net­work, whether con­nected or not, and how their stored data is used. Vis­i­tors who do not have accounts on Face­book are also involved. The social net­work uses track­ing codes, also known as cook­ies, which are placed on the user’s com­puter dur­ing a web­site visit. Wide­spread, they are use­ful to sites and online ser­vices to see if a user is logged-in, or if they have already vis­ited the web­site. A good exam­ple being when you shop on Ama­zon, the prod­ucts you were shop­ping for last week are star­ing you straight in the face this week.

Dif­fer­ent cook­ies for mem­bers and visitors

Face­book uses two types of cook­ies: one for mem­bers and one for non-members of the social media platform.

For mem­bers with an account, Face­book uses a ses­sion cookie to keep the user con­nected as long as the same browser is used. The cookie stores and com­piles data such as name, email address, friends’ lists and pref­er­ences. It also stores unique ele­ments such as the IP address and tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion on the con­fig­u­ra­tion of your com­puter and browser. Finally, it logs the page views that con­tain a Face­book plu­gin such as the “Like” but­ton with time and date and inter­net address (URL).

Non-members who are sent a link to a Face­book page, as well as mem­bers dis­con­nected from their accounts, are also tracked. In these cases, a browser cookie replaces the ses­sion cookie. A unique iden­ti­fier replaces the per­sonal data such as name and Face­book data. Although no longer asso­ci­ated with the account of the social net­work, the rest of the infor­ma­tion col­lected does not change. The tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion is retrieved from the com­puter (browser, oper­at­ing sys­tem, IP address) as well as the date and address of vis­ited web pages, par­tic­u­larly if they con­tain one of the many Face­book plu­g­ins: “Like” but­ton, shares, com­ments, activ­i­ties, etc.

Face­book has no plans to stop col­lect­ing this infor­ma­tion and this stance is fur­ther sup­ported by its rep­re­sen­ta­tive Andrew Noyes. He explains that Google, Microsoft and other major Inter­net behe­moths already use this method for tar­geted adver­tis­ing. The social net­work with 800 mil­lion mem­bers said they use dif­fer­ent data for adver­tis­ing to mem­bers con­nected in Facebook.

For ordi­nary vis­i­tors, the track­ing is help­ing to improve secu­rity and the user expe­ri­ence. Accord­ing to Facebook’s spokesman, the con­nec­tion logs are used to iden­tify fake accounts and block mis­use. The col­lected data is used to under­stand and improve the use of plugins.

The choice to the user?

Cook­ies in them­selves are not dan­ger­ous files from a pri­vacy per­spec­tive. And, it is pos­si­ble to fil­ter or block cook­ies for indi­vid­ual web­sites or ser­vices, but it also elim­i­nates han­dling the prac­ti­cal side of this file tracer. But what­ever the pur­pose, a vis­i­tor or user of a ser­vice should be able to choose whether to accept the track­ing of their brows­ing activity.

In 2012, the W3C stan­dards body will set the stan­dard for DNT “Do Not Track”. It will allow the user to indi­cate whether he wishes his surf­ing habits to be used. Face­book, as well as Google, Microsoft and other major inter­net play­ers took part in the discussions.

At Ban­ner, user pri­vacy is paramount. We con­stantly mon­i­tor leg­is­la­tion to inte­grate the lat­est direc­tives into our cam­paigns and we use a care­fully selected suite of online mar­ket­ing tools that enable us to pro­tect the user’s rights.

Inter­ested in find­ing out more? Why not read our white paper: ‘Here comes the cookie mon­ster – mak­ing sense of EU Data Pro­tec­tion Legal Frame­work’

Related posts:

1. Dig­i­tal Couch No. 9 #digitalcouch
2. B2B social media plan — I want one