Federal Trade Commission has been asked to inspect Facebook’s practice of gathering information from users even after they log out from its service.
In a letter to Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, two lawmakers Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Tex.) raised the concerns. They accused Facebook of tracking users without their permission.
They wrote, “When users log out of Facebook, they are under the expectation that Facebook is no longer monitoring their activities. We believe this impression should be the reality.”
On Sunday Nik Cubrilovic, an Australian blogger, raised concerns about Facebook using tracking cookies in a blog post. However, Facebook says that it doesn’t monitor its users’ browsing habit and will take necessary initiatives to address the blogger’s concerns.
“We value the security community and their willingness to provide feedback on issues that they identify,” a Facebook spokesman said.
However, Faceebook denies the fact. On Tuesday, Facebook engineer W. Gregg Stefancik wrote,
“I want to make it clear that there was no security or privacy breach — Facebook did not store or use any information it should not have. Like every site on the Internet that personalizes content and tries to provide a secure experience for users, we place cookies on the computer of the user. Three of these cookies on some users’ computers included unique identifiers when the user had logged out of Facebook.”
“However, we did not store these identifiers for logged out users. Therefore, we could not have used this information for tracking or any other purpose. In addition, we fixed the cookies so that they won’t include unique information in the future when people log out,” he added.