Facebook has admitted that cookies of its site may have been used for tracking people after they had logged out of the social networking service.
The social networking giant added that it has now fixed the problem.
From in.finance.yahoo.com:
Australian technologist Nik Cubrilovic recently claimed that when the user is logged out of Facebook, rather than deleting its tracking cookies, the site merely modifies them, maintaining account information and other unique tokens that can be used to identify its users.
The social networking giant has described the huge privacy breach as a simple mistake, that software automatically downloaded to users’ computers when they logged in to Facebook ‘inadvertently’ sent information to the company, whether or not they were logged in at the time, the Daily Mail reports.
“We place cookies on the computer of the user,” said a Facebook spokesperson.
The company admitted that some Facebook cookies send back the address of users’ PCs and sites they had visited, even while logged out.
“It’s just the latest privacy issue to affect a company that has a long history of blunders relating to user’s private information,” the Facebook spokesperson added.
