Facebook’s ubiquitous like button has worked it’s way onto almost every blog and news outlet, and many other sites that encourage their readers to share content via social media. It’s iconic ‘thumbs up’ graphic and the simplicity and ease of use have made the like button a huge success. A study by Bright Edge research shows that 25% of the top 1000 websites include a plugin from Facebook (the most popular being the like button), and that there have been over 65 million likes and shares of the top 1000 websites. This level of activity demonstrates a very tight integration between popular sites and Facebook.
Facebook’s Domination
As we all know, Facebook is an internet giant. The average salary at Facebook is around $100,000/year, they have over 2,000 staff employed at offices in 24 countries, and the company’s net worth is around $84 billion. But very few of us have paid them a single cent in our lives. What’s filling in the gap?
Really, really effective advertising. By allowing advertisers to target the exact audience they are looking for, Facebook creates a much more effective advertising platform. They know who you are, what you like, what your job is, etc. and when they show you an ad, it’s more likely to be successful when they target you. In addition, people spend significantly more time on Facebook than anywhere else on the internet, which means an ad on Facebook is significantly more likely to be seen than an ad anywhere else.
But really, I don’t mind that they use my data to help advertise. Facebook is a great service that I use all the time for free, and if their motive is to show me ads that I am more likely to actually appreciate than some strange robot telling me about lowering my mortgages, I’m all for it. But Facebook is growing, always looking for ways that they can know me better, and they often utilize technology in a very clever way and includes things that most people are not aware of.
Let’s Talk About Cookies
From Parks and Recreation on NBC
So what exactly are they doing? Before we get to that, let’s talk about cookies — and sadly, I don’t mean the kind you can eat. Cookies are a way for a website to know who you are. By default, when you log in to any website, then go to another page (maybe from your home feed to your profile), the website forgets who you are immediately (http is a stateless protocol). Having to log in again every time you go to a different page certainly wouldn’t be convenient, so cookies are the way that websites can remember who you are.
I’ll admit it, the name cookies makes no sense — they are really just small files stored on your computer that contain the name of the website that stored them, and a couple other little bits of information, most often your user name or ID. Any time you load up a new page, a website has the right to ask your computer to give it back cookies that it originally set. The computer happily abides, the website sees your user ID in the cookies, and goes “ohhh right, I remember who you are. I’ll keep you logged in then.” Makes a lot of sense, right? The important part here is that a website can only get back cookies that it set originally. Imagine if they could get any other site’s cookies as well! That would almost certainly be dangerous, and is prohibited in all modern browsers.
Cookies and the Like Button Can Log Your History
Back to the like button. Any time you put a like button or other Facebook plugin on your page, you are essentially embedding a tiny window that loads Facebook.com and just shows the button. This means that if a Facebook like button is on your page, it knows where you are, and it can get the cookie back from facebook.com as well and figure out who you are too. The embedded site (and button) then diligently records the website that you visited, the date and time that you visited it, your browser, computer’s address, and screen size, and quietly files that away, associated with your user name behind the scenes. Clever, huh? Even if you are logged out from Facebook, it still tracks you. It doesn’t use your name, but uses a unique identifier which Facebook could easily associate as soon as you log in. However, Facebook maintains that it does not engage in this behavior.
Facebook keeps a log of the last 90 webpages you visited and they were able to track, and plans on using this data to provide additional targeting information for advertising.
What else does Facebook know about you? A whole lot. And the more popular it becomes, the more they can find out. Although there is a page at which you can apparently download all your information, there is a lot that does not come with this file. Users have reported that after petitioning Facebook extensively, they were able to have Facebook send them a CD containing a PDF of all the information that has been collected about them, as it is required by law. These documents can extend up to thousands of pages and contain a vast range of information logged by Facebook, including chat logs, credit cards, emails, computers used to log in, pokes, locations/checkins, removed friends, and much more. And all of this data is retained even if your account is deleted.
What does all of this mean?
A lot of people learn about these things, panic, and swear off Facebook, claiming that it’s an invasion of privacy and puts all their personal information in public (sometimes throwing their computers in the dumpster). I think this is a bit extreme. As mentioned earlier, Facebook is a fantastic free service, and they are simply trying to keep themselves alive and funded by creating a more effective advertising platform. As with most aspects of internet privacy, it’s important to note that although they are logging loads of information about you (if you use gmail, google has all your emails stored and can read them any time as well), they are not sitting around reading your chat logs and making fun of you. Not only would there be no reason to do this, there’s no way anyone who works at Facebook has the time for it. Your data is processed en masse by computers and used simply for targeting ads.
On that note, the fact that they have so much information about you could potentially be a concern if their policies change. If they were to make your personal information available for purchase, for instance, there would be cause for concern. This does not seem likely, but it’s worth keeping a careful eye on Facebook terms and policy changes.
So while the amount Facebook knows about you may seem scary, it’s important to keep it in perspective: although it’s good to know what’s being tracked and what isn’t, as long as they continue to use your data only for advertising, it is certainly not something to be freak out about. In fact, we should be happy that it allows them to show us advertising that we could benefit from.
