After I re-joined Facebook I remembered why and what bothered me in the first place about this social platform. Not only the fact that the user interface is not optimized for a smooth and intuitive browsing through it, which makes the majority of users leave their advanced options untouched, thus compromising their security, but also the aggressive advertising and tracking made through this social platform.

The Issue: Facebook’s Social Apps are Always Watching

Most people don’t realize that Facebook can continue to monitor their internet activity, even if they are no longer logged into the site. The new Open Graph social web applications (which is developed by FB) sends information to Facebook and can post to your profile or share with your friends whether you want them or not. FB doesn’t ask for your permission to use these infos. In other words listening to a song, reading an article or watching a video – you are sending information to Facebook which can after that automatically share your info in your news feed or to your friends feeds regardless if you want this information to be publicized or not.

Logging out is not enough.

Signing out of FB to deauthorize the browser, does not stop the tracking as this is achieved through cookies that you will store in your cache. These are always sending information of your activity and they are set to never expire so you will forever have them cached. Furthermore these cookies store  your account number thus they always know who you are, what browser you use, what system, your IP data, your location based on ISP data etc.
The engineers at Facebook say that this is a feature not a problem and let you resolve it, or consider otherwise.

Nearby Friends feature tracking

This feature will track your location and share it with your friends that have this service on also.
The catch is that it will store your location history ( but not share it ) even if you are logged out or you are offline. Thus advertising nearby stores , clubs, coffee shops is more accurate and straight to the point — meaning you.

Tracking results for 2 tabs open with Firefox + FB logged off see bellow. Using DoNotTrackMe in Firefox

facebook-track

Facebook advertising appearing in my timeline after visiting booking.com and clicked to view specific accommodation.
This was exactly where I made reservations:

notwanted-facebook

And i was logged off from FB.
But the tracking does not stop here, it continues to other sites also using the same cookie from Facebook

unwanted-track

In the end:

It would be real respective of these platforms if:
1. They Advised You of the Intrusion
2. Gave you complete control of stopping the footprint.
But then again this is how they make their money from analyzing your footprint and pushing targeted ads. In the end these social networks have the best business model where their clients (YOU) provide THEM with all sorts of intriguing information for free.

On the other hand Facebook is small fry compared to Google. For some reason most people just think google is fine, but they have their hand in everything. We should all be concerned about that data and who controls it and for what purpose. Whoever controls web search controls everything these days. You can opt out of FB but that’s a lot more difficult with Google. ( We also have alternatives for search engines like Duck Duck Go search and Yandex which are good and not very popular ).

Yes, it is a free service but they sell your info without your permission or full disclosure of what they do with your browsing data. That is wrong and if they persist despite consistent complaints, laws should be put in place to regulate them.

PS: Has anyone ever „accidentally” shared a link to a porn-tube site? For some reason they have that option next to videos now. :))