It appears Facebook continues tracking users outside of its site, regardless of their login status. According to Nik Cubrilovic, Facebook leaves a cookie on your computer, even after you log out. This allows them to track where you go, so long as the external website has a Facebook “Share” or “Like” button on it.

This really should come as no surprise, considering the user is actually the product. What better way to determine what should be marketed to you than to capture as much of your web browsing history as possible.

You do have a couple of options to ensure this doesn’t happen to you:

• Don’t use Facebook
• Manually clear your cookies after logging out of Facebook

For the privacy-sensitive users, there are some third-party solutions to help you manage your cookies more intelligently. If you are a Mac user, I would recommend Cookie from SweetP Productions. This helps you manage your browser cookies, Flash cookies and databases for Safari, WebKit, Chrome, Chromium, Camino and Firefox from a single interface. If $14.99 is too much, you can give their free Safari Cookies plugin a try. I use the latter, and I couldn’t imagine browsing without it.

In addition to privacy concerns, I also wonder how this would impact users on a shared computer. I could only imagine how siblings’ Facebook accounts would start to blur from a web browsing history perspective.