Hidden Pixels, Click IDs and Other Tricks … Is The Internet Just One Big Spying Network?
I don’t use Facebook (Meta), and I don’t like visiting a website that obviously has customized adverts for me. There’s something not quite right about private information jumping over browsers and websites. And so a new paper opens up the methods that Facebook have been using to track user activity [here][1]:
Tracking users
Overall, many methods have been developed to detect tracking and try and block users from leaving an activity trail. The methods that advertising companies have used include first and third-party cookies, cookie synchronization, and fingerprinting mechanisms. In the paper, the authors outline that Meta has recently defined a tagging mechanism with a one-time tag (FBCLID — Facebook Click ID). This is then added as a tag for links that go to other websites — a leaving present from the site, and thus allows Meta to track the linkage between the sites (Figure 1).
