
NHS.uk allowing Google, Facebook, and others to track you - iuguy
http://mmt.me.uk/blog/2010/11/21/nhs-and-tracking/
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chaosmachine
You know, I never really thought about this before.

It's obvious that clicking the "like" button will give Facebook information
about you, but what's less obvious is that just by loading the widget,
Facebook gets the referrer, and can essentially track every page you visit (at
least, the ones with like buttons).

And the same would be true for Facebook Connect widgets. Even if you don't use
it to log in, Facebook still gets your IP and the URL of the page you're on.

It's a brilliant strategy. Figure out how to get your iframes on as many pages
as possible, and you've got an easy way to track your users' surfing habits,
second-by-second, as they navigate from one widget-loading page to another...

Of course, ad companies have been doing this forever, but ad providers aren't
ubiquitous, and they don't have your real name, address, etc. And everyone
[edit: everyone who cares about these things] runs adblock anyway. But how
many people block widgets, or would even think to?

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Zev
_And everyone runs adblock anyway._

You're overestimating the number of people who use AdBlock. Most people don't.
Myself included.

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underdown
Google analytics users have to specifically opt in to share their data with
Google.

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rakkhi
At work we were debating how this happened: Someone in marketing said hey the
hot trend is add these social buttons to everywhere, security team: small
change no detailed review or thinking of implications

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kevinpet
Good thorough article. I think we'll soon need to make "incognito mode" the
default and have to explicitly enable "social mode".

