Two U.S. Congressmen, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have called to initiate an investigation into Facebook. The Federal Trade Commission to investigate how the social network’s users continue to be monitored by tracking cookie, once they have logged out.
“When users log into Facebook, then they expect that Facebook activities are no longer persecuted. We believe that this should be the reality. Facebook users should not be monitored without their consent,” wrote the Democrat Edward Markey and his Republican Joe Barton colleague in a letter (PDF) to the FTC. Facebook has collected information, if its members had visited websites or affiliated with Facebook pages with a “Like” button. In the last category fell an estimated 905 000 sites.
A Facebook spokesman told to demand that his company will store any data without permission. “There was no breach of security or privacy. Facebook has information that it should not have stored or used,” said Andrew Noyes writes in an e-mail. Like any other Web site, the personalized content offering, also lay behind Facebook cookies on the computers of its users. Three of these cookies on some computers had been inadvertently provided with a unique identifier. The data are not stored and therefore not used to track the user or other purposes have been.
The problem was discovered in an outsider, so Noyes continued. Facebook has identified with the help of his three cookies. “We have solved the problem quickly so that the cookies do not contain any unique identifier, after someone has logged out.”
Facebook is still a long time to hold on to the practice that its cookies remain on the computers of its users after they have logged out. Arturo Bejar, director of engineering at Facebook, told the Wall Street Journal on Monday that it would take some time until this is changed. Markey and Barton, however, require a quick solution: “Facebook should give this issue a top priority and allocate the necessary resources.”
Facebook specifies that served Logged-out cookies to the safety and protection of the users. Among other things, they should help to identify spammers and phishers, unauthorized access to the account to determine the user help after a hack back to his account, to prevent re-registration trials of underage users with a different date of birth and to improve with other measures of security. Users should delete all the cookies but the social network if they do not want it learns of their surfing habits.
The Congressman Edward Markey and Joe Barton have asked the FTC to investigate Facebook’s use of cookies (Image: Edward Markey and Joe Barton).
