The social networking giant uses tracking cookies to keep a running log of every page users have visited for the past 90 days, engineering director Arturo Bejar tells the USA Today. It also tracks anyone, user or otherwise, who happens onto Facebook for any reason.
New guidelines for online privacy are being hashed out in Congress and by the World Wide Web Consortium, which sets standards for the Internet.
If privacy advocates get their way, consumers soon could be empowered to stop or limit tech companies and ad networks from tracking them wherever they go online. But the online advertising industry has dug in its heels, trying to retain the current self-regulatory system.
Online tracking involves technologies that tech companies and ad networks have used for more than a decade to help advertisers deliver more relevant ads to each viewer.
But the social networking giant says it uses that data only to improve its security and user experience—unlike Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and loads of smaller companies that use the same technology to target advertisements to users.
But not everyone is convinced of Facebook’s intentions—Congressmen Ed Markey and Joe Barton, for instance, sent Zuckerberg a letter asking why Facebook had applied for a patent on a method of correlating tracking data and ads. Facebook’s response? “We patent lots of things,” a spokesman says.
Via: USATODAY
