Seven years ago former hacker turned security blogger Nik Cubrilovic reported that even after logging out of Facebook the site's cookies were neither removed or deleted, only altered, which explains how Facebook can still track visits to sites using Facebook widgets and tie them to a user's Facebook ID. This capability is something Facebook has been able to do for a long time. This can then be used to draw inferences on the user used to target advertising or content. Through all these conduits Facebook harvests data and associates the web usage to the user's Facebook ID, whether they are logged into Facebook or not. Perhaps least obvious is the Facebook Pixel, a virtually invisible widget that partner businesses can embed in their own sites and use to feed data back to Facebook for retargeting. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a user's activity on Facebook itself (who he or she "likes", who they follow, who they are friends with, what pages they shop on, etc.) can easily be tracked by the company, however Facebook can also track user activity on any other web sites that contain Facebook "like" buttons, embedded comments, or other Facebook widgets. The Facebook Container extension isolates users' identities to a separate container tab, which makes it harder for Facebook to track other web activity. Firefox has released an extension that it claims will stop the company snooping on users’ non-Facebook web traffic.
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