https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9097-2246
1. Internet users tap Facebook Inc.'s "Like" and Twitter Inc.'s "Tweet" buttons to share content with friends. But these tools also let their makers collect data about the websites people are visiting.
2. These so-called social widgets, which appear atop stories on news sites or alongside products on retail sites, notify Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don't click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal.Few things about these widgets :
- Prolific widgets
- Already added to millions of web pages in the past year.
- The widgets, which were created to make it easy to share content with friends and to help websites attract visitors, are a potentially powerful way to track Internet users.
- They could link users browsing habits to their social-networking profile.
- For example, Facebook or Twitter know when one of their members reads an article about filing for bankruptcy on MSNBC.com or goes to a blog about depression called Fighting the Darkness, even if the user doesn't click the "Like" or "Tweet" buttons on those sites.
- A person only needs to log into Facebook or Twitter once in the past month. The sites will continue to collect browsing data, even if the person closes their browser or turns off their computers, until that person explicitly logs out of their Facebook or Twitter accounts.
- Facebook places a cookie on the computer of anyone who visits the Facebook.com home page, even if the user isn't a member.
3. Thanks http://online.wsj.com
