Social Share Privacy

panzi.github.com

19 points·samanchrani··6 comments

Social Share Privacy is a jQuery plugin that lets you add social share buttons to your website that don't allow the social sites to track your users. The buttons are first disabled and a user needs to click them to enable them. So in order to e.g. like a site on facebook with these social share buttons a user needs to click two times. But in return for this extra click a user can only be tracked by this third party sites when he decides to enable the buttons. Using the settings menu a user can also permanently enable a social share button.

Repository to fork: https://github.com/panzi/SocialSharePrivacy

Many German websites have had this for years. I seem to remember hearing that it was mandated by law that social buttons had to be deactivated by default to protect privacy, but I'm not sure whether that was actually the case.

Here is a brief explanation in a German computer magazine: http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/2-Klicks-fuer-mehr-Datenschut.... Their implementation: http://www.heise.de/extras/socialshareprivacy/ (which I believe this is a fork of?).

I would really love to see more sites adopt this approach. Tracking users in this was is completely unacceptable.

If I can toot my own horn a bit here, I did this 4 years ago:

https://github.com/jamesdwilson/socialshareprivacy

Privacy Badger (https://www.eff.org/privacybadger) already has the capability to replace social media widgets.

That's perfectly fine for those of us who use such addons, but does nothing to help the average non-technical user from being tracked.

Have we entered the "ClickToFlash" era of social trackers? I hope so!

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