Like button and privacy

Question

I work on a website in the EU, and currently there are no ways without these social buttons (by their "there").

Recently, there has been concern regarding the legality of this in the EU , in particular the collection of user information sent to US servers without explicit user consent.

There was a German report on golem.de, as well as advice from a lawyer (sorry, only German) that this would be enough if the built-in button does not automatically initiate interaction with the American server as such, but only with the consent of the user, that is, with manual interaction, such as a click.

We are currently using the official method, as well as subscribing to the edge.create event , to understand its use. But, unfortunately, this works by downloading an iframe with content from Facebook, thereby immediately sending user data without his consent, without even clicking on him. I am looking for a way to avoid this.

Idea: show a local image with a local href that starts uploading Facebook stuff only when the user actually clicks on it.

The problems that I see in them are:

• The user clicks on my DOM element, and now I will need to act how the real FB button was pressed, but how can I do this, since the real button is not there? If I load the button, the user will see the second one, they will need to click again, etc. I will need to boot if you close the screen, fake a click, etc. Complex and confusing.
• A counter next to similar ones will be absent. I need to find a way to get this information for the current URL (for example, on the server side), securely cache this data and still show it to the user. I have no idea where I can get this data.

Whether in the EU or not, the law or not, since I only recently began to study this issue (because my work required it), it made me creeps when I realized how it works. I am a web paranoid, I can’t believe that I am alone.

Any ideas how to solve the above problems?

Answer 1

For me, the final solution is how the German German portal heise.de implemented it.

Unfortunately, all this is in German, but their solution is to display a fictitious picture instead and allow the user to selectively allow it for the entire site. See an article in German or a Google translation of English .

This created a rather interesting user ( German article , Google Translation into English ) and already called Facebook (supposedly from Germany) a plan, as they wrote in their article, that it’s against their policy to use their button in the way they did.

Update:

And now he is in Slashdot: Heise 'Two Clicks For More Privacy' against Facebook

Answer 2

The edge.create callback does not include the user id; it simply notifies you of how the How button is clicked. If the user has not provided his data to you in any other way, there is no way to determine from Facebook who the user is, either from the presence of the Like button, or from the user. Clicking on it.

Facebook Questions and answers about what information Facebook collects when users view Like buttons but don’t interact with them: https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=186325668085084

To answer your specific questions:

• I am not sure how to do this if this does not annoy the user. Effectively, you describe the solution in which you want to offer Facebook. Like functionality, but first ask the user to click "I want to see Facebook Like buttons"

• You can access the Like current account for any URL or object in the Graph API at https://graph.facebook.com/ , for example, calling https://graph.facebook.com/facebook returns the following information ( in JSON format):

  { "id": "20531316728", "name": "Facebook", "picture": "http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/174597_20531316728_2866555_s.jpg", "link": "https://www.facebook.com/facebook", "likes": 51545712, "category": "Product/service", "website": "http://www.facebook.com/\n", "username": "facebook", [...] 

in the likes field there is not exactly the number that will be displayed on the Like button, but this is a good number to start with. (The actual number on the Like button also includes other statistics, as indicated at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ )