Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

Edit: Thanks for question from @BradFraser. "Can you turn it off?" ... No, you can't turn it off, unless you log out whenever you leave FB. This also means that simply by looking at an "enabled" external page they know it. There is a new privacy option under "Privacy | Applications & Websites | Instant Personalization" that is enabled by default, you should turn it off so the site doesn't read your profile on visit. This can't stop Facebook however.

I'm curious about who the "them" is in this second sentence. According to Facebook's FAQ about this, no personal info is shared with sites using social plugins (http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17092).

Is the fear that Facebook will be collecting which third-party sites I visit?

But then again, a later FAQ question (http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17100) states that the third-party sites have full access to all of my non-public FB data.

Sorry, I should have made that more clear. Facebook knows about it. To get the plug-in, the browser has to hit the Facebook servers so all the context has already been passed along. I will edit. Thanks.

Thanks. The Facebook FAQ seems contradictory about this:

1) "Social plugins are engineered in such a way that no personal information is shared with websites using them."

2) "When you and your friends visit an instantly personalized site, the partner can use your public Facebook information, which includes your name, profile picture, gender, and connections. To access any non-public information, the website is required to ask for you or your friend's explicit permission."

This seems contradictory unless "personal information" is taken to mean "non-public information".

Or are "social plugins" and "instant personalization" not the same thing?

The way I understand it, if you have the "instant personalization" feature On (and it is by default), when you visit an enabled site, they can request your personal/non-public information to give a better experience. If you turn that feature off, they can only access your public info ... Pages and whatever else you leave open. Again, all this stuff is public by default.

I'd like to hear some backup of this theory though.

The big winner here is Facebook. Comments, likes and all that stuff all make they way back to the Facebook mothership. The external websites may or may not get access to that info.

I suggest looking at the Facebook social plugins on the developer's site. Play around with them for a few minutes and you'll see that they are somewhat benign. I may be wrong and am open to someone telling me that if they present examples.

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