Facebook and privacy: “Social plugins”

After the various gaffes Facebook has committed in the past, the most recent one—where their instant personalisation feature lets you see relevant information about your friends the moment you arrive on select partner websites—was perhaps overblown, because, as it seemed, they had been burned enough to realise that users were going to demand an off switch. In fact, contrary to some alarmist claims (some of which, alas, I initially bought), it was entirely disabled by default.

Imagine my surprise when I visited some site (Photobucket?) to see a little Facebook area asking me what I thought about the page! I checked my settings: Instant personalisation was indeed disabled. What was going on?

It turns out that there’s another partner feature in Facebook called social plugins. These provide one-way communication from partner sites to Facebook, from what I understand.

What you are seeing is a "Social Plugin." None of your information – your name or profile information, what you like, who your friends are, what they have liked, what they recommend – is shared with external sites you visit with a plugin. Because they have given Facebook this "real estate" on their sites, they do not receive or interact with the information that is contained or transmitted there. Similarly, no personal information about your actions is provided to advertisers on Facebook.com or on the other site.

Well, even so, I didn’t want this. It made the page ugly and cluttered with stuff I didn’t want, and felt vaguely creepy, as though Facebook were following me around. So I looked for an off button for this feature as well, but didn’t find one. Consulting the FAQ:

No data is shared about you with the website when you see a social plugin on an external website. For information about what Facebook receives, see here.

You can choose to use social plugins when you click the "Like" or "Recommend" button on a piece of content you want to share. These actions are similar to public comments or reviews you might write on a website and are shared back to your Facebook profile. You can choose who can see the things you like in your privacy settings. If you would not like to see what your friends recommend or have shared on a website, simply log out of Facebook.

Oh, I see. You can’t disable this feature. That’s OK (says Facebook), because they don’t share any information about you. Of course, they are still tracking you:

When you visit a partner site, Facebook sees the date and time you visited, the web page you are on (commonly known as the URL), and other technical information about the IP address, browser, and operating system you use. This is industry standard data that helps us optimize your experience depending on which browser you are using or letting us know that you are logged into Facebook. If you are logged into Facebook, we also see your user ID number. We need your user ID to be able to show you the right social context on that site. For example, when you go to a partner website, we need to know who you are in order to show you what your Facebook friends have liked or recommended. If you log out of Facebook, we will not receive this information about partner websites but you will also not see personalized experiences on these sites.

We do not share or sell the information we see when you visit a website with a Facebook social plugin to third parties and we do not use it to deliver ads to you. In addition, we will delete the data (i.e., data we receive when you see social plugins) associated with users in 90 days. We may keep aggregated and anonymized data (not associated with specific users) after 90 days for improving our products and services. This is consistent with standard industry practice.

Let’s be clear: The information they collect is pretty much the same information you should expect any website to collect about you. And, of course, there is generally no reason why two companies couldn’t collate their information entirely without your knowledge to track your browsing habits. What it does mean is that if you’re logged into Facebook and you visit their partner sites, Facebook does track what pages you visit, what pictures you look at, and so on.

It’s up to you to decide how comfortable you feel about that.