Facebook tracks every website you visit

In the past few weeks, there has been a constant argument between Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission regarding whether the community media website is breaching the user’s privacy by exposing too much of their private information over the Internet. Moreover, a quiet debate is also developing about a different area of online confidentiality: what Facebook is discovering about individuals who visit their website.

Facebook administrators are now admitting that the social media giant has created a consecutive record of the Web pages visited by each of the 800 million members during the past 90 days. Facebook even keeps a track of where other non-members of the social network go on the Internet, after they have browsed through a Facebook Web page. Arturo Bejar, engineering director of Facebook, says that to execute this, the company depends on tracking cookie technologies corresponding to the controversial systems employed by Adobe, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and others in the online marketing industry. The focal point of the “Do Not Track” debate was whether users should be able to stop sites from keeping a track of their online activities.

Fresh rules for online confidentiality are being discussed over in the World Wide Web Consortium and in Congress, which places standards for the Internet. Internet tracking makes use of technologies, which ad networks and sites have been utilizing for over 10 years to help advertisers provide more significant ads to individual viewer. But privacy supporters are anxious regarding how the records might be used, and whether there is any possibility of it being sold to third parties.

Till now, Facebook, that gets its maximum profits from advertising, has been uncertain about the level to which it gathers tracking data. It argues that it doesn’t fall into the same category as Microsoft, Google and the other major players of the online ad industry. This comment was made by the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg on national television last week. For the last few weeks, Zuckerberg and other Facebook representatives have explored to differentiate how Facebook and others utilize tracking data. According to Bejar, Facebook uses such information only to enhance security and improve the performance of “Like” buttons and other related Facebook plug-ins. Plug-ins are those Web applications that gives access to Facebook services from innumerable third-party web pages.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes declares that the company doesn’t have any plan to change the way they use this data. He adds that the company’s intentions are completely different from data brokers and ad networks that intentionally track people to make profiles of their behaviour, make use of that content to target ads or sell the information to the top bidder.

This is a guest post by  P.Smith