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Comment by barumrho | Hacker News Reader

One thing that he mentions in the video is the fact that Facebook Like buttons are everywhere. They can track many of the sites you visit.

View on HN

A google for "firefox facebook blocker" returned:

http://webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker/

A simple grep of your HN comment history shows equivalents to 'Like'

  http://www.webmasterkb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/javascript/35764/For-all-those-jQuery-fanboys
  https://github.com/derwiki/redirect_tracker
  http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ltwatch/id482807766
  http://angularjs.org/
  https://github.com/ludicast/angular-peepcode-todo
  etc.

How is Facebook worse than this??

I think the point is that the simple presence of a Like button tells Facebook that you've been there. You don't have to click it, you just have to load it. HN comment history is active participation.

Ok, so I see the point that the websites you visit invite Facebook tracking onto their pages.

But one can trivially block these autoinclusions.

---------

http://webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker/

My work's firewall directs Facebook.com and Twitter.com to /dev/null . This stops all such tracking.

Individuals could do their own blacklist via Greasemonkey / Charles proxy equivalent.

And that's exactly what some of us do. But there's no way you're getting all of your facebook friends to do the same. Facebook can build a profile on you based on your friend's tracking data. Whether it'll be accurate or not is mostly a technical question - whoever looks at it will assume it's accurate. There are a lot of nefarious uses for this information and there's no useful way to opt out right now, short of not having created a facebook account. Hence the whole "mass surveillance" bit.

The leakage of information by friends is a problem.

But it is not a problem owned and invented by Facebook, it is any network.

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