Out of pure anger or insanity if you will, I have decided to block entire facebook.com domain and relevant domains it uses. Thus I set a filter on my firewall to reject anything coming from Facebook to my computer. At first I didn’t understand why on some pages I’m missing parts of the page, until I came across a page that wouldn’t load completely. Mistake, I thought until I noticed that one entire page didn’t load due to my firewall filter. I have disabled my firewall and voila – the page loads. After examining the page content (I was looking for a guitar tabs) I have noticed it had a Facebook Like button at the end. I’ve started up my Wireshark to take a deeper look and there was something interesting to see.
I have captured original http request for the like button and here it is:
http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?app_id=101904016574879
&href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FUltimateGuitar
&send=false&layout=button_count&width=130&show_faces=false
&action=like&colorscheme=light&font&height=21
Nothing out of the ordinary it seemed, that is the general API call for Facebook Like button. I was not convinced that my search hit the rock bottom there, so I continued to look further until I’ve found this:
http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?channel_url=
https%3A%2F%2Fs-static.ak.fbcdn.net%2Fconnect%2Fxd_proxy.php%3F
version%3D3%23cb%3Df20f8a758%26origin%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252F
tabs.ultimate-guitar.com%252Ff224fae7e8%26relation%3D
parent.parent%26transport%3Dpostmessage&extended_social_context=
false&href=facebook.com%2FUltimateGuitar&layout=standard&locale=
en_US&node_type=link&sdk=joey&send=false&show_faces=true&width=225
This particular portion of the request got me worried:
origin%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Ftabs.ultimate-guitar.com%252Ff224fae7e8
ORIGIN???
I will not get into how is this information used, but it should never leave my computer without my approval. Origin of my visit was sent to Facebook while browsing a page, without being signed to Facebook, without a cookie in my browser, without even having a Facebook account at all!!!
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