The cat came back: Cubrilovic spots another Facebook 'tracker'

If nothing else, Australian blogger Nic Cubrilovic is giving Facebook a sense of what it feels like to have someone watching you all the time. No sooner is one Facebook cookie drama damped down than he triggers another.

In that latest to-and-fro, Cubrilovic asserts that the Facebook ‘datr’ cookie, which sparked a drama earlier this year when the Wall Street Journal outed The Social Network™ for tracking the “Like” button even for non-Facebook computers, is back.

That problem was fixed, but according to the latest post from Cubrilovic, it’s lurched back out of the grave with no sign of decay.

The ‘datr’ cookie, he writes, “is being set by all the third-party sites we tested”.

“It is the first cookie that is set, for all users of Facebook, and right now is being set for everybody on any Facebook integrated site - logged in or not logged in,” he writes, adding that Ashkan Soltani has submitted a bug report to Facebook (Soltani contacted The Register separately regarding this issue).

Facebook responded in a post on Cubrilovic’s site, saying that “we still have a policy of not building profiles based on data from logged out users”. The Facebook engineer, who identifies himself as Gregg Stefancik, says the behaviour discovered by Cubrilovic is not a “re-enabling” of the cookie, but rather a “separate issue involving a limited number of sites, including CBS Sports”, and promised a fix “today”.

A Facebook spokesperson in Australia declined to elaborate beyond Sefancik’s remarks. However, The Register can confirm that at the time of writing, the CBS Sports Website is still setting ‘datr’. ®