USA Today Unveils How Facebook Tracks Users Activity

Posted by Anant Patel

December 09, 2011

Social Media 14 min read

Facebook unveiled the information that how they are keeping a track of their users behavior. Their user may be little uncomfortable by knowing this that Facebook not only track their activity but also keeps a log of it as Facebook keeps a running log of the sites a user has visited in the past 90 days.

Facebook Tracking Details Released

The information about how Facebook track a data is resealed by USA today, with the help of Facebook representatives Arturo Bejar (Facebook’s engineering director), Gregg Stefancik (Facebook’s engineering manager), Andrew Noyes (Facebook spokesman), and Barry Schnitt (Facebook corporate spokesman).

Facebook start its tracking of user’s behavior from the very first visit. When you are visiting a Facebook at first time or you are registering your account, you get two cookies; first one is a browser and second one is a session cookies. A first one cookie allows Facebook to show a message to you an alternatively when you are visiting a next time on Facebook site.  And second one is used to declare that which account is accessing by you in present. If you don’t register your account on Facebook, you will get only the browser cookie from web server.

A session cookies are very common but on Facebook it is little bit problematic for facebook to track user events. However, every page over the internet contains Facebook plugins in it, and we all familiar with the most common one a Facebook “like” button, with this your cookies got manipulate results in confusion for FaceBook. But Facebook is enough smart to deal with it, Well due to this cookies Facebook ables to stored all information of each and every page that are visited by you. Facebook plugins are present on large numbers of pages which are visited by you and Facebook keeps a exact log of its. This information is saved in Facebook log for 90 days.

If you go online and visits Facebook site but not logged into your account, then also your IP address, screen resolution, details of your operating system, and other basic information of yours computer are stored in Facebook log. All these things are possible with the help of Facebook browser cookies. And if for a single minute you logged in into your Facebook account at same time all basic information of yours that are name, email, friend’s information, etc. and that sites which are visited by you which contains a Facebook plugins in it are saved in Facebook log immediately.

How Facebook use this Information.

Facebook having all the data of its users and also knows that how Facebook can use that data. But the company is using personal information of users only to know that how Facebook plugins are working, how much the site is used, which browsers are most popular, and many other information which can help them to improve their social network by which they can serve you an excellent user experience.

An issue is present in possible use of data which are stored in Facebook log. By help of this log, Facebook can reach up to an unplanned approach on user’s religious beliefs, his medical conditions, sexual orientation, political preferences and much more. Because of this, so many peoples are thinking that should Facebook can uses this data for their personal interest, for benefits of advertisers or sell theirs information to others on compromising of serious breach of privacy with them.

Facebook did not have right to use a log (tracked) data for such kind of purpose. While Facebook corporate spokesperson Barry Schnitt says that, “We patent lots of things, and future products should not be inferred from our patent application,”. His statement gives relaxation to users from their doubts about Facebook log.

What you feel about the cookie tracking? Do you really think that Facebook will misuse the tracked data? What is the response of users? What government regulation, if any, should be implemented? Leave your thoughts in the comments, below.

Categories

Let's Talk