This "like" button plug-in gave Facebook permission to gather a lot of user data. In classic Facebook fashion, the company collected cookies (that are essentially a trail of user activity on Facebook) which gave the company access to what sites a user was visiting, what items they viewed and purchases, and other interactions they may had with the website.
Is Facebook’s ‘Like’ button spying on you
This is especially jarring because Facebook was tracking user activity regardless of the user using the "like" button, court documents claim. At the time, Facebook said that it would stop collecting cookies when users were logged out. But a 2011 article on Wall Street Journal shows how the company continued to collect cookies even after users had logged out.
What do these buttons do?Their primary function is to let users share items from across the web with their social networks. But they also place "cookies" on a user's computer that allow Facebook and Twitter to know when a user visits a specific page. If you visit any web page with a "Like" button on it (like this one), Facebook knows about it. And the buttons "could link users' browsing habits to their social-networking profile, which often contains their name," says Amir Efrati in The Wall Street Journal.
But Pinterest's secret weapon is undoing the weak, overused "like" button and its Web siblings (notably, the Twitter re-Tweet). Pinterest asks you to create something in your liking, not just mention it scatter-shot, or worse, meekly affirm it. This might just totally change how we think about sharing. As novelist Jonathan Franzen bemoaned in an insightful commencement speech this May, liking (courtesy of Facebook) has become an epidemic online substitute for actually doing passionately or loving something (he takes this far out, suggesting it is raising a generation of soul-less narcissists, more or less):
Of course the tools we're given are only as good as we how we chose to use them. Both Pinterest and Quora's Boards appeal to our vanity, as does that little "like" button. Did you re-pin my cookie recipe?! Are you following my board?! Just as liking after while felt obviously and oddly self-promotional and complimentary at the same time, so too could these new tools for discovering and sharing ourselves.
The "like" and "share" buttons on other websites follow you on the Web, whether you have a Facebook account. Once clicked, you are inviting Facebook into your life. It can figure out with those clicks who you are, where you live and what device you use to access the network.
The social button allow other third parties, like advertisers, marketers and data brokers, to watch what you're searching, visiting and clicking, "and use that information to target ads to you on Facebook," she adds.
The accuracy of Facebook's ad targeting sometimes leads users to believe that Facebook is spying on them by tapping the microphones in their phones. Facebook has denied the practice - and is likely telling the truth because uploading and scanning the amount of audio data such a system would involve an unattainable amount of processing power to understand context. It sounds believable: Joanna Stern's mother told her to buy the decongestant Sudafed in the morning, and by afternoon she sees an ad for it on Facebook. Instead, Facebook gleans its insights from the data it collects by watching us move around the web and, in some cases, in the physical world. The Sudafed ad was generated like this: earlier in the day Stern bought tissues and the nasal spray Afrin at Walgreens, keying in her phone number in order to get loyalty points. A third-party data collector added the contents of her shopping cart to the purchase history it acquires from Walgreens, and then sold it to Sudafed manufacturer Johnson & Johnson, whose specified targeting coupled with Facebook's account data, led to an ad targeted at Stern.There are ways to opt out of a fair amount of data gathering, but it requires discipline: don't use loyalty cards, or register them to a phone number or email address you don't use for other things; opt out at the data brokers' websites; turn off location tracking in your phone; and check on the ads shown by other apps on your phone. Finally, use ad blockers and opt out of targeted ads on Facebook itself.
So, let's look instead for actual proof that it's either happening or not. First, let's be clear on one point. When we say "your phone is listening to your conversations," we need to understand what's meant by that. Modern phones all have a basic, and very important, security feature: and that's that you must explicitly give permission to any application to allow it to access your phone's microphone. And there is a very important distinction to understand about this. You know how you can click in a text field, to post an update to social media, for example. Then you can click the microphone button to use speech to text, allowing you to speak your update so you don't have to type it. This is a function of your phone's operating system, just like the keyboard. It's not the social media app that heard you speak; it's only the operating system. It performed the speech to text conversion and then sent the text to the social media app. It is not necessary to give permission to the social media app to access your microphone to use speech to text. So the ability to use speech to text in an app does not mean you've given it microphone access, and if you haven't, there is no Earthly way that app can overhear your conversations.
Facebook 'like' and other social media buttons are often embedded by businesses in their websites to enable users to like and share content. Facebook 'like' buttons collect user data (including IP addresses) as soon as the user lands on the webpage, regardless of whether or not they click on the 'like' button or whether or not they have a Facebook account. This data includes IP addresses and is sent to Facebook. Facebook may then use the data in other processing operations.
Firefox also takes your privacy a step further with its Facebook Container extension. This will prevent Facebook from tracking users across the web. It works by blocking embedded Facebook capabilities, like Share and Like buttons on a site.
A leaked recording of Facebook security chief Alex Stamos (who refused to help with an illegal NSA spying program when he was CSO for Yahoo) has him describing the company's IT culture as being "like a college campus, almost" while the company has the "threat profile of a Northrop Grumman or a Raytheon or another defense contractor."
Facebook Messenger is like a frickin virus. It takes over your SMS, phone, contacts, and they force you to download it just so you can view your facebook messages. Chat heads pop up automatically, dominating your phone.
"People have asked about the 'dislike' button for many years, and probably hundreds of people have asked about this, and today is a special day because today is the day that I actually get to say we are working on it, and are very close to shipping a test of it," he said.
Review activities: Under Activity Log, you can review all your activity across the social network, including posts published, messages posted to other timelines, likes, and event management. You can use the "edit" button to allow something on a timeline, hide it, or delete it outright -- a handy function for wiping clean your older timeline. 2ff7e9595c
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