Earlier today I visited a popular news website and did something I almost never do. I clicked an ad. Now, it happened to be a enticing photo of some glazed donuts and mentioned the name of the town I lived in–apparently a potent combination:
Clicking the ad spawned a new window that brought me to the following page:
And there I noticed several of my Facebook friends embedded in the bottom of the ad. That was strange, I wasn’t in Facebook. I didn’t come from Facebook. In fact, I didn’t even have Facebook open in the background.
I forgot all about donuts. I went over to facebook.com which dutifully landed me straight on my “news” feed, indicating that I had remained logged in from a prior visit. When I logged out and reloaded the ad, sure enough, the my friends had vanished:
I don’t know about you, but that seemed a little creepy. As an astute colleague at work pointed out, this is a case where they let you know–imagine when they don’t! Now I’ve scoured the maze of Facebook account and privacy settings and couldn’t come up with a way to turn this off.
So, my lesson learned is to log out of Facebook (assuming I don’t just delete my account), don’t do business with whatever “livingsocial” is, and most importantly… stay away from donuts!