Wilted buttercup, grey skies, and geek

So Facebook announced their new Facebook Places functionality a couple of days ago, the service seems well implemented, and following the uptake of 4square, probably a timely service for fb – good luck to them.

What I am most disappointed about (**rant) is the way that Facebook, seem to think that an “OPT-OUT” policy is the right way to go about landing new functionality on their users. By default, Facebook allows your friends to log your geolocation at given point in time. And this is simply NOT ACCEPTABLE. As far as I am aware (and please do let me know if I am wrong), none of the other popular geo-logging services allow for other people to log your location at a given point in time. I see this as a massive invasion of your privacy, and as have others, as discussed in the following CNET article:

Shots already fired over Facebook Places privacy

An OPT-OUT policy to services which compromise your privacy and your personal information is simply NOT acceptable, and DRACONIAN. I mean, Facebook, DID NOT even attempt to inform me, that friends of mine can can geolog my location at any given point in time. I mean, what is stopping a friend of mine, who is hanging out in a brothel from geologging me, and defaming my character, by suggesting that I too was at the same place as him.

I noticed this yesterday, and then I got round to tweeting it, and had a lot of people thanking me for informing them of this change of service. So, I thought I would expand what is going on in a bit more detail. If you would like a more verbose write up on how to disable this new “feature”, visit the Garlik blog article:

Garlik Blog: Disabling Facebook Places.

As far as I am aware there has been no recent changes to Facebook’s privacy policy or their terms of service as illustrated on the awesome Terms of Service Tracking site. From my point of view, Facebook should inform their users about new functionality, especially new functionality which by definition shares your geolocation information both with people within Facebook, and with the Skyhook geolocation gazetteer.

There has been a lot of hype and talk around the Facebook Like button, and I do understand that the issues I raise in this blog post have been addressed before, I will cite some relevant literature at the bottom of this post.

In short, I fear that Facebook via the Facebook Like button which you can find on many high volume, mainstream sites, such as imdb, rottentomatoes, cnn, etc, is tracking you even if you are not logged into Facebook from your browser.

So, I have no solid evidence to say that they are DEFINITELY doing so, but I will explain why it is technically possible for them to do so. And well, the cynic in me thinks that if it is technically possible for facebook to log that my facebook id is on a given page, it will, regardless of whether or not I am logged in or not.

From this point onwards, I will be referring to all of various versions of the Like button, i.e. Like, Recommend, Fan, etc as the Facebook Like button.

So, the Facebook Like button can be implemented in one of two ways, using facebook’s XFBML or via the inclusion of a Facebook iFrame. FWIW, all of the instances of the Like button I have come across have been implemented using the iFrame approach, but I will look into the XFBML method of doing things soon and will blog about it then (he says …)

So, if you are a facebook user, and you have visited facebook
since the last time you cleared you cookies, you will have a facebook cookie in your browser. It is this cookie which allows facebook to inform you of how many of your friends have liked the page your browser is currently pointing to. An example of functionality can be seen in the below screenshot.

I am aware that if you are signed out of facebook you wont see your list of friends which are have already clicked the like button, you will end up seeing something like:

So, given that the Like button is an iFrame, i.e. it is actually hosted on www.facebook.com, it means that facebook can read your facebook.com cookies, and they can tell whether you are logged in (to show you which are of your friends have “liked” the page before you). And well, technically this implies that they know who you are which enables them to tell whether you are logged in or not.

Dan Brickley created a neat drawing of the what a iFrame is actually doing (thanks Dan, and see below). The illustration highlights the fact that a page which seems to be coming from a given web address, if it includes an iFrame, is actually coming from multiple web servers.

This is danbri’s illustration of what an webpage which includes iFrame’s is actually doing

This makes me class the Facebook Like button in the same category as ad tracking sites, insofar as the fact that if you turn up to a page with a Like iFrame, and you have a facebook cookie, you are in theory being tracked, regardless of whether or not you choose to click the Like button or not.

So, why do I class this in with ad trackers, I do this because of the fact that you are being tracked passively, i.e. regardless of whether or not you choose to like something, facebook is theoretically logging the fact that you have been to that website.

So, now to give an example :

Let’s say that you turn up to cnn.com can you visit the below article:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/29/wisconsin.roush.crash/

The page them subsequently loads up the following iFrame and serves it to you, it renders the Like button on the page, the iframe revolves to a url on facebook.com

http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?action=recommend&…

By going to the first URL, you are also hitting the second one. Your user-agent, which based on http://panopticlick.eff.org/, is kinda uniquely identifiable, and is therefore in facebook’s logs. Given that the iFrame (second URL above) is hosted on facebook’s site, they CAN read your facebook cookies, am NOT saying that they do as I can’t prove that in anyway, but my guestimate is that if they are not, they will be in the future.

So, I can see three scenarios, which are relevant to this

• A user is logged into facebook in their browser, and then visits a site in a different tab, not even knowing that the site has a facebook “like” button, because you will only become aware of the “like” button upon arriving at the page and having it in loaded in your browser, which is too late from my POV. This happened to me last night, and happened to me recently when I went to imdb (sighes).
• A user is not logged into facebook, but has facebook cookies in their browser, they go to cnn.com, facebook knows (with a high probability) that a given facebook ID has visited a given site, by virtue of cookies and stuff
• User has no facebook cookies, and then facebook will only get the user’s user-agent in their access logs, which I bet they store (even though once again I have no proof of this.

Ok, so solutions:

Solution 1 :

You can delete all of you facebook related cookies from your main browser (firefox being browser of choice), and then you can download another browser which you use for facebook’ing, so that you are no longer given facebook the option to track the pages you read on the web.

Solution 2 :

Which is the solution I am going for at the moment is that you can install Adblocker Plus and you can block all of the Facebook Like endpoints, using custom filters.

This is an export of my Facebook Like button filters, it is probably far from complete, and I will put it up a service which you can subscribe to in Adblocks Plus, and will update the list of URLs as and when I come by them (will blog post when I am done with this.)


[Adblock]
! Checksum: 1+81iD/9dKSZiqqW6WtQxA

The following screenshot, shows what my current step looks like in Adblocker plus:

My colleague Vaidas Jablonskis (who is awesome), pointed me to Adbocker Plus which is also totally awesome

Finally, it is worth mentioning that I am not sure whether or not all of these sites which have facebook like buttons are explicit about the fact that their users CAN be tracked passively by facebook. Or whether reputable brands like CNN have any form of agreement with Facebook regarding whether or not their users are being track. Are any of these big companies, breaking their terms and conditions ?

I will post an update on step by step instructions regarding how to subscribe to my Adblock filter list of facebook like buttons endpoints soon.

So, I suggest people download and install Adblock and block facebook like buttons, and subsequently install the Facebook Like plugin , so that they are no longer being passively tracked by Facebook, and so that they are in control of when they tell Facebook that they like a given web page.

Finally, links to existing literature in this space:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/23/like-buttons-evil-facebook-not-open/

http://philosophicalzombie.net/post/540799211/has-facebook-just-become-the-evil-empire-whats-wrong

Comment, corrections, or a simple “you are wrong because …” are very welcome

Happy Interneting People

I use Firefox as my primary browser, both at home and at work. So I have setup my Safari browser, as my private browser – that is sans cache, history, cookies or anything of a similar nature. I noticed that the “Private Browsing” option in Safari, doesn’t do that good a job of not leaving files hanging around in one’s operating system, furthermore unless your careful, Spotlight will eventually end up indexing your browser history, cache, which may be less than ideal.

In order to have a zero cache safari instance on my laptop I have taken the following steps :

• 1: Removed spotlight’s prying eyes, by excluding the following directories :
  • /Users/<USERDIR>/Library/Caches
  • /Users/<USERDIR>/Library/Safari
  • /Library/Caches
• 2: Setup two cronjobs to constantly delete Safari cache-dir

*/10 * * * * find /Users/<USERDIR>/Library/Safari -type f -exec rm {} \; 2>&1 > /dev/null
*/10 * * * * find /Users/<USERDIR>/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/ -type f -exec rm {} \; 2>&1 > /dev/null

And finally, I have created a wrapper .app file which open’s Safari, and then enables “Private Browsing” mode, as I could not find a way to do this through editing the Safari.plist file. I followed the instructions posted on the MacWorld site, and they go a little something list so:

• 1. One needs to enable the Enable Access for Assistive Devices option, which can be found in the Universal Access system preference.
• 2. Open the AppleScript editor, and type in the following commands :

  
tell application "Safari"
   activate
end tell
tell application "System Events"
   tell process "Safari"
    tell menu bar 1
     tell menu bar item "Safari"
      tell menu "Safari"
       click menu item "Private Browsing"
      end tell
     end tell
    end tell
  end tell
end tell


• 3. Save this shiny new AppleScript as an application (.app file), and I called mine “PrivateSafari.app”.
• 4. I then grabbed the icon file from Safari, and added to the PrivateSafari, and then replace the old shortcut in my Dock, with one to “PrivateSafari.app”.

It should be noted that I am well aware that the private browsing features in most of the modern web browsers have come under a certain amount of scrutiny recently, below are some links to articles for the interested reader :

• Private browsing modes leak data – BBC News
• Private browsing: it’s not so private – Ars Technica
• Private browsing ‘not so private’ – IT Pro
• Private browsing modes in four biggest browsers often fail – The Reg

I have long been thinking about how the interweb affects the notion of practical obscurity and how one can no longer expect to be forgiven for a crime after they have served their sentence.

An example I have used for a while now is the Georgia Sex Offenders mashup

http://www.georgia-sex-offenders.com/maps/offenders.php

IMHO sites like the above one will just end up creating ghettos of sex offenders as real-estate agents start to adopt such online resources to help sell properties to future homeowners. Eventually we will see neighbourhoods of sex offenders as no family would ever choose to live next to a rehabilitated offender. The key word in the previous sentence being “rehabilitated”, as they have been released by the judicial system into the community as reformed human beings.

Now one can install an iPhone App, which tells the phone own about sex offenders in their local area, GPS/web magic, note that this only works in the US :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/5918923/iPhone-app-tracks-sex-offenders.html

I believe that practical obscurity is a dying concept. At this point in the post I should stress that I DON’T classify sex offences are petty crimes, but I believe that the advent of such data on the web will set a president for other forms of crimes to be being posted to the public domain. I can easily imagine a future where all crimes committed in some US state X are posted to the web.

For example, high-school student Bob gets arrested for shop-lifting and gets a minor punishment that could be community service or something of a similar vain. Alice a classmate of Bob’s finds this so funny that she posts it to whatever cool social network she is currently a member of, pushing it into the public domain. Now after Bob has served his sentence in pre-interweb days this information would have been practically obscure, it would have been logged in a filing cabinet in some local magistrate court, and unless you had the impetus to seek out this information you would probably never have found out about it. Alice would have been able to communicate the “funny story” to her social network, but those conversation’s would not have been in the public domain. And now they would be.

Well that is all from me, would love to know if people in the US have installed this APP, and wonder how many linch mobs are going to run around US cities taking following their trusty iPhone and taking the law into their own hands. Here is a link to an article which describes some of the vigilantism which occured in the UK after the tabloid new paper “The News of the World” published a list of sex offenders in the year 2000. Do excuse the fact that I am pointing to a document on the “world socialist web site”, but it seems to report the story well

Furthermore, Kieron O’Hara, Nigel Shadbolt and I wrote a paper touching on this a while back, it can be downloaded from ECS eprints.