Re: The Facebook Like button

Hi Danny, 

On 31 Jul 2010, at 07:06, Danny Ayers wrote:

> On 31 July 2010 02:24, Mischa Tuffield <mischa.tuffield@garlik.com> wrote:
>> Hello All,
>> Many have been banging on about issues surrounding the Facebook Like button
>> and its proliferation on the web. My concerns are that services which are
>> hosting this "social" component are not being transparent wrt to what are
>> the capabilities of the Like button, and that they are not being upfront
>> with their users about the "opt-out" nature of the button.
>> I have described this in detail on my blog :
>> http://mmt.me.uk/blog/2010/07/30/the-facebook-like-button/
> 
> I'm not sure the onus on transparency should be on services which host
> the component, rather that Facebook should be more upfront to its
> users that by signing up with them, they are agreeing to be tracked. I
> don't know what Facebook tell folks that use the component, but
> wouldn't be surprised to find that there wasn't much mention of the
> potential "covert surveillance" aspect.

Agreed, that Facebook should probably be telling their users about what they are doing, one could have a look at the Terms of Service Tracker to see what changes have been made to their policies [1]. My issue is with third party sites such as CNN, which make an attempt at listing the advertising networks which they use by stating their advertising practises [2] and which do not list Facebook as one of their ad tracking components. I am concerned that decision makers at places such as CNN are not even aware of the "opt-out" nature of the fb's tracking. And tempted to write them...


[1] http://www.tosback.org/organization.php?cid=8
[2] http://www.cnn.com/services/ad.practices/


> 
> But for a large proportion of Web users (e.g. those for whom the Web =
> Internet Explorer) such warnings would likely be ignored, the
> perceived benefits of getting more utility out of Facebook outweighing
> any malware concerns.

Sure, hence why I think the service providers should be more transparent. 

> 
> Whatever, it does seem like the horse has already bolted on this one.
> While it's reassuring to know that it is possible to dodge the
> tracking (with AdBlocker Plus or whatever), I can't see much mass
> appeal in such an approach. Even if such functionality was built into
> the browser, it wouldn't necessarily get used.
> 
> Just a thought on raising awareness of the issue: an iFrame that looks
> like Facebook's Like button, but actually calls a proxying server
> which in turn does the call that Facebook expects, but also presents
> the person browsing with details of what they just told Facebook about
> themselves (and perhaps a link to http://panopticlick.eff.org/).

Indeed the eff link you mention is super scary, and I would love to have time to find out how much of the JS evilness required to produce your digital footprint is used across popular services. 

> 
> Incidentally, not long ago I put together some semwebbish analytics
> code, and in the process reviewed approaches to cross-domain Ajax -
> notes here: http://blogs.talis.com/n2/archives/770

:)

> 
> Cheers,
> Danny.

Happy weekend folks,

Mischa


> -- 
> http://danny.ayers.name
> 

___________________________________
Mischa Tuffield PhD
Email: mischa.tuffield@garlik.com
Homepage - http://mmt.me.uk/
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