I suspect that most people do not in fact have a Facebook account. Last I checked, world population was over 7 billion and Facebook did not have 3.5 billion accounts. Or did you mean "most people who live near where I live"? But even there, the existence of Facebook shadow accounts means they will stalk you even if you do not have an account.

As a further point of fact, Facebook (and Google; Facebook is not alone here) stalks even people who _can't_ have a Facebook account. For example, children under 13 in the US.

Certainly there is no defense there. I will say though, much like real life one should be careful of the company they keep - in this case websites which partner with these companies. We should be just as pissed or more at the websites enabling this behavior.

Yeah, I really wish websites would just stop embedding Facebook Like buttons. That would already help a lot.

>As a further point of fact, Facebook (and Google; Facebook is not alone here) stalks even people who _can't_ have a Facebook account. For example, children under 13 in the US.

Surely this is illegal, though? One way to get the laws to ban this sort of dragnet commercial surveillance of people would be to appeal to the 'think of the children' argument and ban companies from tracking information about anyone under 13. That would also stop them from tracking information about anyone that hasn't totally confirmed that they're over 13.

> Surely this is illegal, though?

I don't know enough about the law on this to comment.

> would be to appeal to the 'think of the children' argument

Tempting, though I worry about unleashing demons even if you think they're on your side... ;)

Facebook tracks you even without an account.

So if I buy a watch from someone on Craigslist, he's no longer a "stranger" and the onus is now on me to explicitly inform him to not follow me around? Doing business with someone or some business should not imply consent to their monitoring you.

You describe a one-off transaction in which no expectation of future contact is anticipated. Facebook is an account with an on going relationship. Its the difference between seeing someone multiple times and saying hello to a stranger on the train.

I'm not saying they don't take it too far, but certainly someone with an account has invited facebook to do some data collection and tracking.

Fine, so instead of Craigslist Guy, let's use Home Depot, where I shop often. Just shopping there does not imply my consent to them tracking where else I go and shop throughout my day. Merely having an account somewhere or regularly doing business somewhere should not imply consent to tracking and data collection, to which I must opt out.

ADD: I probably have 100+ accounts at various sites online. Do these guys all get free passes to collect data and track me because I happen to have created an account there?

If you opened a credit account with Home Depot or had their loyalty card you'd be literally consenting to more tracking. That's the difference between an account and a one off transaction.

Facebook certainly operates outside of even this rather liberal framework so I wouldn't defend them wholesale. However I don't like false equivalencies.

It's one thing to track me on facebook.com where I signed up, another to track me on blogs, newspapers and everywhere else.

> Its the difference between seeing someone multiple times and saying hello to a stranger on the train.

It goes further than that, as it affects other people too.

See also: Eben Moglen's talk about how privacy is ecological, not transactional.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartIII.html

Facebook also spies on people who have never used the service.