© Minyanville
"Listen, and understand. Facebook is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are commodified and sold."It's no secret that Facebook's privacy policies are wholly lax and subject to wiggle room. Names, contact information, browsing habits, and private purchases have been logged and shared -- even when users have logged out of their accounts. But a new report from the Hamburg Data Protection agency -- a privacy watchdog group within Germany -- has uncovered a new level of privacy-invading depravity that Facebook has sunk to.
-- Kyle Reese, in a deleted scene from The Social Network.
The social network is allegedly tracking users even after they've canceled their accounts!
For up to two years!!!
According to Bloomberg, the agency found that cookies installed and stored on a user's computer continue to track web activity even if their account is closed. Facebook counters that it "deletes account-specific cookies when a user leaves Facebook" and any cookies are for security and personalizing content.
But Johannes Caspar, a representative for the Hamburg Data Protection agency, isn't buying it.
"Arguments that all users have to remain recognizable after they leave Facebook to guarantee the service's security can't stand up," Caspar writes. "The probe raises the suspicion that Facebook is creating user tracking profiles," which is illegal if the users aren't informed.
Although the agency reported that Facebook is willing to discuss the matter further if necessary, for a company so large, so encompassing, so intrusive, so powerful, any previous allegations of privacy invasions hasn't significantly curbed its massive growth.
Why should it stop now?
to keep facebook's information gathering a little more at bay. One good step might be to create an entirely separate facebook profile in firefox and ONLY browse facebook in it, while browsing everywhere else and NOT facebook in your original profile.
"Creating a new Firefox profile on Windows" - Mozillazine knowledge base
[Link]
(linux is a similar process)
You could then create a new shortcut by copying the original firefox shortcut, naming it something like "Firefox - facebook" and editing the command shortcut to be "/firefox.exe -P ", perhaps naming the profile facebook ("firefox.exe -P facebook" in that example). All you have to do then is run that shortcut and use it for facebook ONLY.
If you've used firefox in the past with facebook, it might be wise to either clean the original profile (especially deleting cookies, but they may have information somewhere sneakier) or create a brand new one and migrate over settings and personal information from the old one. There are also a number of privacy settings in firefox that could help and extensions that can delete or disable other secret storage locations of private data, including flash cookies and other sneaky gathering techniques.
There are a number of relatively easy technical steps one can take to preserve one's privacy to a degree online, but certainly no guarantees and google has its hands in nearly everything (they were funding all of Mozilla's development for sometime and perhaps still are). They could know everything already or they could not--might as well bet that they might not and at least make it a little less easy for them.