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Facebook Defends Getting Data From Logged-Out Users
[Quote]:
Facebook on Monday defended its practice of gathering data from “Like” buttons even after users have logged out, saying that the collection is part of a system to prevent improper logins and that the information is quickly deleted.
[..]
“The onus is on us is to take all the data and scrub it,” said Arturo Bejar, a Facebook director of engineering. “What really matters is what we say as a company and back it up.”
Short version: “trust us!”
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Short version, revised: best to keep NoScript.
(Alas, NoScript doesn’t work so well for non-technical users. I should research some day whether it can be set up with an auto-updated blacklist (much like the adblocker) so most sites just work with no fiddling.)
Alternative short version: my own browser (AdBlock, with Firefox as a rendering engine) is set up to block *all* of facebook (and several other sites like it).
Whenever I really need something off facebook, I launch Safari, browse the page, and quit Safari, which clears a lot of data including cookies. I use Safari for nothing else.
That solves the Facebook problem specifically. I was talking about more general usage by folks like my parents. My dad had read an article about safe browsing and installed NoScript for Firefox, at which point of course many sites broke in subtle ways. I ended up uninstalling NoScript. It’d be nice if there was an intermediate path where NoScript only blocks known privacy invasions via a blacklist that’s hosted somewhere. I know there are some extensions like Better Privacy, I just haven’t surveyed them.
Neither have I, sorry.
I have been using Better Privacy, on FF and Seamonkey for over a year and have had no issues. I have not tested it on Facebook and the like, as I prefer to avoid cesspools. @ John, care to share you “facebook (and several other sites like it): block list? Thanks
Just visit the facebook home page, open adblock, and the “blockable items” list, and filtering. I don’t know offhand what other sites I’ve blocked in similar ways, facebook seems to be the only one that comes up again and again, the others may even not exist any more. Is myspace still active?
Once you do this (blockable items)it will reveal a list
Example
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/y7/r/65nC4O4UBKg.js
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yB/r/TwAHgQi2ZPB.png
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yL/r/YPRNBqQhJ3f.js
Their sign up page is fairly clean. If you block these or even ad your own filter rule in Preferences like http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/* it makes facebook fairly useless as it blocks needed content like css, js, etc. (But fairly useless is fine for me.) If one has a facebook account, to really tune this, you would need to first log into it and then look at the block-able items.
Myspace.com is a better example. Opening block-able items you can see that it goes after the marketing and ad stuff and already blocks them.
fbcdn.net is their content delivery network. Safe to totally block.