In the past year, I realized that every single person I know has a Facebook account now! This only means that Facebook has become an integral part of our daily habits…by the way, it also means that we understand what exactly Facebook is getting from us in return for the free platform to express ourselves and how much of our privacy are we ready to compromise in exchange.

While Facebook and their representatives claim that they are not interested in tracking the usage and activity of their users, their Patent Application with US Government Patent Registry on 22-Sep-2011 gives a different picture.
The link to their patent claim is given below if you are interested in the details:
Facebook Patent For Communicating Information In a Social Networking System about Activities from another domain
Scary, isnt it?
Based on my knowledge about cookies, I spent sometime researching on what exactly happens when we login to Facebook account. It was quite obvious that when I was logged into facebook during any session, all my activity done in the same browser in the other tabs, or in the same tab, were easily available for Facebook to pass back to its servers. The more scary part is that even after you logout from Facebook, the cookies continue to exist and your data in future sessions are also available to be logged and tracked.
Based on the observation and study, here are the recommendations:
(more…)