Jared Newman reports:
For Facebook’s next act, the social networking site will break free of its domain and let you “like” things all over the Web, according to two news reports.
The New York Times and the Financial Times tell a similar story based on unnamed sources: Facebook wants to expand beyond its core site with a “like” button that Web developers can embed in their pages. Yes, it’s yet another media sharing tool in the style of Digg and Reddit — it just happens to be aligned with the second-biggest Web site in the United States.
[…]
It seems like any time Facebook does anything, privacy is part of the discussion. That’s likely to be the case here, as some marketers tell the Financial Times that they’ll use “like” information to target ads at users. Analysts tell the New York Times that privacy concerns are possible as shares more details about users with external Web sites, though that seems like a more general issue than a specific flaw in the “like” service.
Facebook denies that it will use the service to track users across the Web, saying that it bases ads only on information users fill out in their profiles. “We have no announcements or changes planned to our ad offering and policies,” a Facebook representative told the Financial Times.
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