Facebook is spying on you...here's how to stop them!

Have you noticed that Facebook "Like" button on websites all over the web lately? Of course you have. You may even have noticed that some websites seem to know exactly who your friends are, displaying their profile icon to establish a social connection with you. While this remains an incredibly powerful marketing tool, it can also be used to track your every move! By that I mean Facebook knows every website that you have visited, regardless of whether or not you are logged in. The only caveat is that you can only be tracked when visiting a web page that is connected to Facebook by means of a "Like" button or other integration, such as a browser plug-in.

This should scare you. If it doesn't, let me continue. Imagine you're browsing the web alone, and you decide to visit an objectionable website. Later, your spouse comes along and visits one of their favorite websites. Using the tracking features Facebook has in place, an ad for that very same objectionable website appears on the screen. Doesn't bother you enough? Well how about this...Facebook stores a list of the sites you visited in order to sell your information to advertisers. But this information can potentially be accessed by parties of less honorable intent.
To be fair, Facebook is not the only offender in the online tracking game. Sites like Google, Yahoo and Twitter also do some pretty heavy tracking of their own. For instance, when advertisers pay for you to click on a link to their website, they will also pay to show that same ad to you while visiting other unrelated websites. This is called re-marketing and it happens to you every day. However, due to the amount of personal data shared, and the high percentage of web users with a Facebook account, Facebook poses an especially high risk.
So how do you protect yourself? There are several ways, but here I will share my preferred method. Using a web browser plug-in called "Disconnect," we can block tracking cookies used by Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Digg. They will be blocked only when you are not visiting the site directly. In other words, you will still be able to use Facebook and Twitter normally when you are visiting facebook.com and twitter.com. But while visiting other sites which utilize these tracking cookies they will be rendered useless.

First, download and install Mozilla Firefox. Once installed, open the following link in Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disconnect/

Firefox will ask if you want to install the add-on. Choose "yes" and let it install. You will be asked to restart your browser to complete installation. Click "yes" and wait for Firefox to restart. You should now see a button with a blue "d" to the right of your address bar in Firefox. Done.

You can now browse the web securely, knowing your every move is no longer being tracked.

DynaSpy Guy
DynaSpy, Inc.
DynaSpy.com