Tonight, I read the New Yorker online, something I do quite often, as I think it's a nice mag. As I scrolled down the page, I noticed this little frame...
By way of explanation, I've obscured my friend's surnames in black, and a couple of strangers in red.
It shows that three of my friends on Facebook shared articles from the New Yorker. Given that, in my mind, I do not associate the New Yorker with FaceBook, I find this vaguely disturbing all by itself, but if you look closely, you'll see that they actually shared the articles as long as two months ago.
So what this means is that the New Yorker, and probably every other website in the world that cares to, knows what my FB friends have been doing, and is prepared to tell me. They are clearly keeping that information for at least the last couple of months, and may well be keeping it forever.
If I want to share an article from a website with my friends, that's one thing, but it makes me very uncomfortable to be reading a website and then be told what my friends have been doing there.
So what can you do about it?
Well, if you log out, then the frame in question changes to this ...
It now shows generic activity, and says I have to be logged into see what my friends have been up to, so a good first step is to make sure you log out when you finish reading FB.
I'm not convinced that this solves the problem completely, and you might have to clear your cookies as well, but at least the sites that are playing nice, like NewYorker, behave appropriately.
A useful alternative is to use two different browsers, one (say Firefox or Chrome) for nothing but FaceBook, and your other browser for general websurfing. Unless some new exploit surfaces, browsers cannot read each other's cookies.
It's a tricky world out there, folks. Keep safe.
Roger
PLEASE NOTE: The opinions expressed above are entirely my own, personal opinions, and may or may not reflect those of my employer.
