Facebook: A Tracking Super Power?

February 12, 2018

One person on the DarkCyber research team called my attention to Hacker news post 16339088. (Be aware that some Hacker News items can become hard to find if the ID does not resolve.)

The post is about Facebook crawling every page recorded by its tracking pixel. If you want to know more about tracking pixels, this link may be useful.

Beyond Search and DarkCyber do not have a dog in this fight. However, the individual posting the assertion “Facebook crawls every page recorded by its tracking pixel” generated some interesting comments.

The DarkCyber researcher noted these, which may or may not be actual factual. Only the Facebook, like the Shadow, knows.

  1. Maybe Facebook does not crawl?
  2. Tracking takes place with “Like” buttons
  3. Facebook uses link prefetching
  4. Avoid using Facebook trackers
  5. Facebook does and does not observe robots.txt instructions
  6. “Shady tracking techniques”
  7. “Facebot crawler will crawl _every_ url that was recorded by their tracking pixel”

What’s correct? What’s incorrect?

Facebook often has useful information for those who have access to that information. Outside the US, some government authorities find Facebook data interesting and highly desirable to access in some investigations.

Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2018

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