The seemingly harmless "Like" & "Tweet This" button on the websites you visited can be used to track your browsing habit even if you never click on them
This doesn't seem to be the full story. If I log out of FB I still have multiple cookies for the .facebook.com domain (e.g., c_user, which seems to contain my user id).<p>The like/comment/etc. 'widgets' are served from facebook.com, so presumably they are still tracking me.<p>Don't know why this article didn't mention Ghostery or <a href="http://disconnect.me" rel="nofollow">http://disconnect.me</a>
It's not really "dangerous", it is just that you give a bit more information to FB/Twitter/$SocialCompany than you thought you would.<p>While, I usually logout of FB or Twitter, I have a few adblock rules to block them on other webpages. It works fairly well... If I want to like and share, I believe I can do it manually...
They couldn't have published a more obvious story. Anyone with any sense doesn't log into either service and you don't need to be logged into either service for them to track you. It's amazing what freely available information (your IP, the sites you visit, etc) can do to help turn you from an aggregate anonymous identity into a fairly well "guessed" identity. And since webmasters carelessly litter their sites with this third party crap, they can build up a significant database of the places you've visisted and your habits, without knowing much else about you.<p>The first thing I did when Facebook rolled out all of that garbage was redirect everything facebook related to localhost and then created adblock/element rules to filter out all twitter and facebook buttons, tags, etc. I even filter out the whole "facebook discussions" crap that are attached to seemingly 80% of pages, these days.<p>Then again, I guess the public lags behind such things. I'm sure there are people out there just today learning what a cookie is, so . . . <i>~shrug~</i>
Ironically, the article's header has Facebook "Recommend" and Twitter "Tweet" buttons. The Facebook one has 4,000 "likes" and the Twitter one has 235 Tweets.
Link to original story:<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281504576329441432995616.html" rel="nofollow">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870428150457632...</a>