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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.

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

But one can trivially block these autoinclusions.

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

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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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