We have no interest, nor do we think it's acceptable for a company to piggyback or use this type of data for any other purpose." Both Corey and McDermott said they do not sell the data their clients collect.įorter says that they were inaccurately included in Princeton's findings. "Tealium is in the business of helping companies manage the data that flows between their users and their digital properties. "No, we do not query Facebook's APIs to pull any user information," he said in a statement. He stresses that his company also doesn't control whether a client installs Facebook's login API and isn't able to obtain or look at any data that their clients collect.Ĭorey said much the same thing. "In no case have we seen that deployment," he says.
#Log face vbook code#
McDermott says that while it's possible to change the code of Lytics' tracking tools to collect information from Facebook's API, it's something he would discourage his clients from doing, and not a behavior his company has seen. But that capability is not usually what a company intended for their tools to be used for.
In other words, a site might buy a tracking product from one of these companies, and then use it to suck information out from Facebook's API.
#Log face vbook software#
They create software and tracking tools that websites can use to find out information about their customers, which sites pay for. First, it's important to understand what these companies, and other like them, actually do. That information can be used to track users across other websites and devices.Īdam Corey, the CMO of Tealium, as well as James McDermott, the CEO of Lytics, explain that the Princeton researchers' findings are not as simple as they may appear, in part because the internet's tracking ecosystem is so complicated. For example, a tracker might have registered that Visitor 1 went to a webpage, but with Facebook Login, they could connect that person to their public social media profile. But the problem is, using Facebook's API, you could easily link that unique ID to someone's Facebook profile. Most of the scripts the researchers examined grab a user ID that is unique to that website, as well as the person's name and email. The study found that this particular breed of tracking script is present on 434 of the web's top one million websites, though not all of them are querying Facebook data from the API-the researchers only confirmed that such a script was present. That can include a user's name, email address, age, birthday, and other information, depending on what info the original site requested to access. The researchers found that sometimes when users grant permission for a website to access their Facebook profile, third-party trackers embedded on the site are getting that data, too. "This is tapping into a social API, which you are not expected to-but this sounds a bit beyond the line." The tracking scripts documented by Steven Englehardt, Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan represent a small slice of the invisible tracking ecosystem that follows users around the web largely without their knowledge. In a yet-to-be peer-reviewed study published on Freedom To Tinker, a site hosted by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, three researchers document how third-party tracking scripts have the capability to scoop up information from Facebook's login API without users knowing. But sometimes, especially on lesser known websites, using Facebook's universal login feature may carry security risks, according to new research from Princeton University published Wednesday.
You've probably used it to log in to services like Spotify, Airbnb, and Tinder.
This is thanks, in large part, to Login With Facebook, the social network's universal login API, which allows users to carry their profile information to other apps and websites. Facebook profiles have become the de-facto identities of people across the internet.
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