A recent article appeared in SmartMoney Magazine last week, called “10 Things Facebook Won’t Say.”  The following paragraph stopped me in my tracks:

… the ubiquitous “Like” button. But press it or not, if you’re logged in to Facebook while surfing, it will know when you visit any site with these so-called social plug-ins, says Nicole Ozer, a policy director at the ACLU of Northern California. “Facebook can essentially track you around the Web,” she says. Facebook makes all such policies known to users, but critics wonder how many people are paying attention.

Seriously?

Perhaps the article is sensationalizing this just a touch.  Artistic license.  However, as I think back on my own experiences with the various Facebook widgets I encounter (and admittedly engage with) around the web it all starts to make sense.

If I am logged into Facebook (and I always am… because, well, who wants to log in and out of Facebook every time they post a status update, egads) and I visit a Facebook-enabled site (which is practically everything these days), a digital message is sent back to Facebook.  Facebook then takes that wee ort of data and stores it neatly in their database.

Hm.  What do you suppose they do with it?  But wait, I’m a little off track.  What I wanted to say was this…

Remember the cookie uprising?

About 7 or 8 years ago or so people got wind of cookies.  Cookies are little one-line strings of codes that get written to a special file on your hard drive when you visit a specific web site.  Each cookie is specific to that web site, and only that site can read it or alter it.  The whole thing is managed by your browser, it’s very secure and rather innocuous.

Well, when people found out about them, they freaked!  They screamed about privacy violations, they revolted, they turned off their cookies and said “so there!”

Now you can fast forward 10 years.  Facebook is now following us around the web, they know who we are, what sites we visit, what products we like and don’t like, what friends and family members we keep in touch with, the things they like and don’t like, and all sorts of other things.

And nobody cares?  Really?  What happened between then and now?  Why is nobody concerned about their privacy?  Is it because Facebook is so much fun and so addicting that people are simply willing to overlook their privacy being blatantly violated?  Do people simply NOT KNOW???

I wonder if anyone still worries about cookies…

If you have any insight into this topic I’m dying to hear it.