London, Sept 27 (ANI): Facebook has denied allegations that it tracks it users when they are logged out, saying it only uses tracking cookies to personalise content and to make the social networking site more secure.
An Australian technologist Nik Cubrilovic, recently claimed that when the user is logged out of Facebook, rather than deleting its tracking cookies, the site merely modifies them, maintaining account information and other unique tokens that can be used to identify its users.
"Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit," Cubrilovic wrote in a blog post.
But Facebook engineer Gregg Stefancik denied that the company tracked users in a comment on Cubrilovic's post, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
Stefancik did admit that Facebook alters, but does not delete cookies when users log out.
He said that Facebook does that as a safety measure, and does not use the cookies to track users or sell their personal information.
"Facebook does not track users across the web. Instead, we use cookies on social plug-ins to personalise content (e.g. show you what your friends liked), to help maintain and improve what we do (e.g. measure click-through rate), or for safety and security (e.g. keeping underage kids from trying to sign up with a different age)," Facebook said in a statement.
"No information we receive when you see a social plug-in is used to target ads, we delete or anonymise this information within 90 days, and we never sell your information," it added.
The social networking giant said that the logged-out cookies are used to identify spammers and phishers, detect when an unauthorised person is trying to access a user's account, help users regain access to an account when it's been hacked and disable registration for underage users who try to re-register with a different birthdate. (ANI)
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