What are social plugins?
Social plugins are simple tools that can be "dropped" into any website to provide people with personalized and social experiences. Using social plugins, websites everywhere can give you more ways to experience the web with your friends--from letting you form connections on these sites with your favorite movies or restaurants to showing you the most popular content based on what is being shared among your friends. Rather than seeing popular stories, products or reviews from people you don't know, you'll now see content that matters to you the most--from your friends--displayed prominently.
Social plugins include:
- "Like" or "Recommend" buttons: Click to publicly share and connect with content you find interesting.
- Activity Feed: What your friends are liking, commenting on or sharing on a site.
- Recommendations: Most liked content among your friends on a site.
How do social plugins work?
While these buttons and boxes appear on other websites, the content populating them comes directly from Facebook. The plugins were designed so that the website you are visiting receives none of this information.These plugins should be seen as an extension of Facebook.
You only see a personalized experience with your friends if you are logged into your Facebook account. If you are not already logged in, you will be prompted to log in to Facebook before you can use a plugin on another site.
At a technical level, social plugins work when external websites put an iframe from Facebook.com on their sites, as if they were agreeing to give Facebook some real estate on their websites. When you visit one of these sites, the Facebook iframe can recognize if you are logged into Facebook. If you are logged in, it’ll show personalized content within the plugin as if you were on Facebook.com directly. Even though the iframe is not on Facebook, it is designed with all the privacy protections as if it were.
What personal information is shared with sites that use social plugins?
None of your information – your name or profile information, what you like, who your friends are, what they have liked, what they recommend – is shared with external sites you visit with a plugin. Because they have given Facebook this "real estate" on their sites, they do not receive or interact with the information that is contained or transmitted there. Similarly, no personal information about your actions is provided to advertisers on Facebook.com or on the other site.
Can websites that use social plugins publish information about me?
No information is published if you do not interact with social plugins. If you click "Like" or make a comment using a social plugin, your activity will be published on Facebook and shown to your Facebook friends who see an Activity Feed or Recommendations plugin on the same site. The things you like will be displayed publicly on your profile.
How can I identify social plugins on websites?
You’ll recognize social plugins by the branding in the footer that looks like similar features on Facebook—the "f" icon is next to the phrase, "Facebook social plugin."
What am I sharing when I click a "Like" or "Recommend" button on external websites?
The "Like" and "Recommend" buttons on other sites work in a similar way to the "Share" buttons from Facebook and other services that you've likely seen on the web for years. These buttons enable you to publicly express your interest in some piece of content with a simple action, similar to how you might rate a restaurant or movie on a site today. Nothing happens unless you choose to click the buttons, and you must be logged into Facebook before you can use them.
When you click "Like" or "Recommend," the button turns darker to indicate that you like or recommend something and are making a public connection to it. Back on Facebook, a story will appear on your profile and may appear in your friends' News Feeds, just as if you had liked something on Facebook. You can click "Like" again if you wish to remove the like.
Your likes and recommendations also may appear to your friends on the website where you clicked the button and elsewhere through other Facebook social plugins appearing on websites (e.g., Activity Feed or Recommendations). Some sites may also give you the option to add a comment when you like or recommend something.
In some cases, when you create a connection to a real world entity, such as a book, movie or athlete, your likes and recommendations become a part of your profile in the same way as the connections you make with Pages on Facebook. They will appear in your "Likes and Interests" section of your profile, and you may receive updates from that connection in News Feed.