[lpolovets]

Bejar said Facebook is looking at ways to avoid sending the data altogether but that it will “take a while.”

Maybe I'm naive, but why would turning off the gathering of information take a while? This reminds me of unsubscribing to email newsletters, where the final goodbye says something like "you should stop receiving our emails within 6-8 weeks."

[mnutt]

Any code changes take a non-trivial amount of time. It sounds like the solution is to delete more of the cookies on logout, but there may be other Facebook services that use them and need to be transitioned away.

[cbs]

>Any code changes take a non-trivial amount of time

Thats a awfully cautions attitude and smells like a huge cop out for the well known fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants commit to live strategy that facebook has.

[mnutt]

I don't work there, but where I work we deploy 10-20 times a day and if somebody asked me to change the way we store data in cookies, it would probably take a bit of time to roll out.

I'm only defending them because it annoys me when people who aren't familiar with the software internals tell me "this is a minor change, it should take you less than an hour".

[0x12]

To be fair though, not doing something is a lot easier to implement than to add new functionality. As a minimal implementation they could err on the safe side and stop tracking everybody for a bit until they've corrected their error.

[pork]

Whatever you've read, Facebook likely has a non-trivial push strategy, just like everyone else. Nobody at their HQ is committing directly to the live site.

[cpeterso]

Facebook's Release Engineering blog says a code change can go from commit to live in less than 60 minutes. Admittedly, they don't say how often they deploy.

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=59150988919

[lbrandy]

Code changes are easy at facebook. Messing with domains/cookies/security/static-resources/etc is more than a code change.

[pbhjpbhj]

Well first you have to create the other company to spin off the tracking to ...

[revorad]

Clearly, "Move fast and break things" doesn't apply when it benefits anyone other than the corporation.

[jurjenh]

I wonder if that involves something like collecting the data and storing it locally on your computer, then only sending the data once you log into facebook...

[rwolf]

Not how cookies work. Visit any page with loads the facebook like widget iframe/img/script -> make a request to facebook with your cookie.

[jurjenh]

I was thinking more along the lines of a local store, but then you'd need a little script embedded into every page to handle the storage.

Essentially, instead of FB like widget -> request to facebook I would think FB like widget -> add to local datastore.

Then FB could do an optimised/aggragated query on the local database. The only thing would be that it would introduce large latency in the resulting data if its sent back only on FB login.

[pork]

That's a micro/premature optimization at facebook's scale.

[yason]

Well, he didn't say not only turning it off would take while. He said looking at ways to do it would take while. Speaking in such weaselese I'm not entirely positive they would ever get close to the actual turning off phase.