A simple discussion about Facebook between my wife and me turned into a debate, and I’d like to get Dopers’ opinions on this.
My wife never logs out of Facebook. She sees no reason for doing so; even if you log out, Facebook’s cookies will track you to any site that has the Facebook plug-in. It’s a pain to log in every time, and if you stay logged in, changes such as setting your Timeline to “Most Recent” instead of “Top Stories” never get undone. The moment you go to Facebook.com, you’re in.
I always log out of Facebook. With all of Facebook’s security breaches (both intentional and accidental), it seems safer to me log out when I’m away from my computer. I look at Facebook at work, so there are two locations where my account could be accessed by someone else. The inconvenience of typing in a password every time is nothing compared to tracking or privacy issues.
Each of us thinks the other is being silly, though it’s not like our marriage is on the line.
We both keep Facebook active on our phones, FWIW.
So: do you log out of Facebook when you leave the site? Why or why not?
Nope. I’m logged in at home, on my phone, and at work. I have plug-ins disabled, and I’m under an alias so my settings are basically public as I can’t be searched unless my alias is known. I don’t have to worry or care about the ever-changing security settings this way.
If my profile was under my real name, I’d probably have privacy settings locked down a bit more - and would probably check them constantly to make sure they haven’t been “re-set” as FB loves to do whenever they make whatever miniscule other changes. I would likely continue to stay logged in though. The only place someone else could look at my home page would be at work if I forgot to log out of my personal user account.
No. I’m logged in all the time unless I use someone else’s computer. Of course my husband wouldn’t know what to do with a Facebook page, so I have saved my friends from those cutesy posts where the husband or wife has messed with the Facebook page and changed the marital status or “Liked” something weird.
I always log out of facebook. I don’t know if they can or do continue to track visited websites that use the facebook plugin via cookies already set on your computer, as stated in the OP. But several times I saw posts on my own wall indicating “Crazyhorse just read this news story…”, “Crazyhorse visited this website…”, etc. even though I didn’t click anything or ‘like’ anything. Simply being logged into Facebook while visiting another website was enough to wind up broadcasting my web activities to everyone on facebook that has the ability to read my wall posts. I have never seen that happen after I took the small step to click ‘log out’ before closing the tab.
If I forget to log out, I know it immediately when I visit any website that does have the FB plugin because I see my friends faces at the top of their window and presumably they could see mine there too. If I am not logged in to FB and visit the same site, I see a random group of strangers there and the message “you must log in to use the facebook plugin”.
Nope. I’m the only one who ever uses my computer, and I’ve never put anything on there that I’d worry about being leaked. (Phone #, for example) I have my profile set to “private”, anyways.
Unless I’m at the library and I need to look something up, I’ve never bothered, or even thought about it.
My password is 20-25 characters long and contains a mixture of letters (upper and lowercase), numbers, and symbols, no dictionary words or names, and is meaningless to anyone other than me - and even I have to concentrate to get it right. I enter that baby as infrequently as possible.
You can always save the password in your browser to avoid typing it every time and still log out of facebook for other reasons.
A lot of the posts in this thread approach the question from the standpoint of someone gaining access to the account via their logged in computer and not being too worried about that happening, but I don’t think that is the only consideration the OP had in mind.
Another consideration is that while you stay logged in to FB but browse other websites you are giving those sites a lot of information about yourself via FB. You might not feel comfortable if some news website required you to give them your name, a list of your friends, your interests, education, etc just to read their news. And on the flip side you are telling Facebook what websites you visit when you aren’t using Facebook. What they might or might not do with that information could be harmless but some might prefer that they not have it just the same.
I only use Facebook from my home computer and my tablet, both of which are used only by me. I stay logged into everything that doesn’t access my money.
I use the mobile app on my phone, and stay logged in to that. At home on my laptop, I only use Facebook in Chrome, and stay logged in there. I do my regular web browsing in Pale Moon (Firefox-ish browser).
My browsers are configured to clear all cookies and caches when closed. When I’m done with Facebook I log out then close/reopen the browser just to be sure.