To protect against scraping, Facebook introduces pseudonymised identifiers with a time stamp. This also protects Facebook for tracking blockers.
In the future, the identifiers contained in the URL will be pseudonymized even more on Facebook than before. This is intended to prevent the automatic tapping of data, so-called scraping. At the same time, however, there have also been allegations that some trackers are being obscured and preventing tracking blockers from doing what they are supposed to do.
Previously, identifiers that could be assigned to profiles on the social network were called FBIDs – Facebook Identifiers. Now a P is added, PFBID – Pseudonymized Facebook Identifier. These are provided with a rotating time stamp to ensure that no scrapers can use them. The previous URLs are gradually being phased out, explains Facebook in a blog post. After that, they look like this, as shown in a picture of Mark Zuckerberg’s profile:
Facebook also emphasizes that this new ID is not intended to prevent browser extensions from recognizing and disabling tracking components. “We use this process to better protect user privacy from certain attacks while still keeping the links long-lived.” A few weeks ago it was noticed that the first links were encrypted. There, too, one had already relied on the protection. Now followed the official statement including a blog post.
Tracking blockers on Facebook and Google undesirable
Some web browsers or extensions can read and block those that track users from the parameters of a URL. Firefox offers this from version 102 under the name Enhanced Tracking Protection and removes relevant parameters if desired. Of course, this is no longer possible if the URL consists of a seemingly random sequence of numbers and letters. The tracking is basically encrypted again.
In the past, the larger corporations that make money specifically from collecting user data have demonstrated that tracking protection is undesirable. Last year, Google banned the popular Chrome browser add-on ClearURLs, which did something similar to Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection, from the Chrome Web Store. However, the company also claimed to have other reasons for the deletion.
