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How Facebook and Google’s cookies track your browser activity (1)

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It probably comes as no surprise that web platforms like Facebook, Google, eBay and Amazon have a lot of information about their users. But what may shock you is that they also know a lot about you long before you register for an account. In fact, they can track nearly all of your browser activity at any time.

What are tracking cookies?

Web platforms use tracking cookies planted on third-party websites to gather information about which sites you visit, when and for how long. Although a platform cannot access another company’s cookie data, Facebook, for example, gets around this by installing cookies onto other websites that feature its like and share buttons, comments section and pixel tracker.

These cookies give companies the information they need to show you targeted ads, change the price of their goods and more. If you use the internet, then odds are that Facebook, Google and other platforms you don’t even have an account with have a “shadow profile” of detailed information about you and your behaviors.

Shadow profiles

After the presidential election of 2016, the United States Senate requested information from Facebook in regards to many of their security practices. For our purposes, we will focus on two responses provided for a single question.

The document asks a question related to if Facebook creates “shadow profiles”. In essence, does Facebook track internet users who do not have a Facebook account?

Here is what Facebook responded with:

“When people visit apps or websites that feature our technology -- like the Facebook like or comment button -- our servers automatically log [their activity]...

These logs are critical to protecting the security of Facebook and detecting or preventing fake account access. For example, if a browser has visited hundreds of websites in the last five minutes, that’s a sign the device might be a bot, which would be an important signal of a potentially inauthentic account if that browser then attempted to register for an account.”

From these answers, we can deduce two things.

1. Yes, Facebook (and almost certainly other web platforms) log your browsing history, even before you register for an account.
2. Irregular cookie activity may lead to flagging a new account. Although Facebook gives the example of visiting hundreds of websites in the span of minutes, we can read between the lines and see that lack of browser history, rather than excessive browser history, is probably noticed as well.

Your browser fingerprint and cookie history

When you go online, websites receive information about your browser, device operating system, language, time zone and other settings. This is your browser or device fingerprint. Then, as you surf the web, you generate a browser cookie history of all the sites you visit. Together, your browser fingerprint and cookie history form the unique identity by which websites and companies recognize and track you.

How do tracking cookies impact my business?

When you operate a business that relies on maintaining multiple online profiles, whether for social media management, advertising, price comparison of competitor’s products or other reasons, it’s a disaster if a profile gets blocked. Not only does it cost you money but also the time invested in building the profile.

Profiles get blocked by web platforms like Facebook and Google when they detect what they define as suspicious browser activity, like a single browser managing multiple accounts. So, how can you manage multiple business-critical accounts while not being blocked?

Solutions to gathering a browser cookie history

One way to help prevent your online profiles from being blocked is to use a virtual profile manager like Multilogin with a good quality proxy. However, when you go to create a new profile, it won’t have any active cookies history which Facebook and other websites will find suspicious. Uploading cookie history to a new browser also doesn’t help because cookies are unique to each user and will trigger security warnings when transplanted.

The solution is to have multiple browser profiles with convincing cookie history that you can switch between.

How to useMultilogin’s CookieRobot

Designed to give you authentic online profiles, Multilogin has a feature created for exactly this purpose: CookieRobot. As the name suggests, CookieRobot is your cookie-collecting companion who crawls websites, scrolls pages and feeds cookies from the web platform of your choice with authentic browser data.

Using CookieRobot is simple. Tell it which websites to visit and for how long, then it opens a new window on your computer and starts browsing. The websites you choose should contain a widget from the web platform you’re collecting cookies for. Extensions can help you find the right websites, like this extension to detect Facebook like or comment widgets.

Once you’ve created multiple profiles with Multilogin and used CookieRobot to feed Facebook, Google and other web platforms authentic cookie data, you can safely log in under those profiles with a significantly reduced risk of getting your accounts blocked.

Try Multilogin for free, or if you’re already a user, learn more about CookieRobot.

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