Managing my mistrust of Facebook
Like a lot of people, I don’t trust Facebook. A lot of people deal with that by deleting their Facebook accounts, but I don’t want to do that. A lot of friends and family members post their photos to Facebook, so I need an account if I want to see them. It’s also the main way to keep in touch with certain people. That’s Facebook’s hook for the skeptical — they know you like other Facebook users more than you hate Facebook itself.
I have never liked it when you go to a page that’s not a Facebook page and it shows your picture and which friends have liked that page already. That provides no value to me as an end user, but it certainly provides value to Facebook. They track your activity using those buttons whether you click on them or not.
This weekend I learned that when you log out of Facebook, you don’t actually log out of Facebook. They still track wherever you go on the Web. That, for me, was the final straw. I logged out of Facebook and deleted all of my Facebook cookies manually.
From now on, when I want to visit Facebook, I’ll be using the private browser setting in whatever browser I’m using. For Google Chrome, that’s Incognito mode. For Firefox, you use Private Browsing. Safari supports Private Browsing as well. It seems like putting Facebook in jail is the only way to keep it from tracking you everywhere you go on the Web, so that’s what I’m going to do.
Update: Facebook has addressed the logout issue. You can decide whether it has been fixed to your satisfaction.
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