We decided to replace our conventional social media buttons with 2-click social media buttons to protect your data and privacy. A while ago, a German privacy group declared using the Facebook Like button leads to profiling that infringes German and European data protection laws. The organization alleged Facebook builds a broad profile for individuals not on the service as well as a more personalized profile of its members.
Emil Protalinski explains: A German website Heise then changed its Facebook Like buttons to be locally-hosted greyed-out images that only transform into real Facebook Like buttons once you click them. In other words, they are not active by default; if you don’t click anything, Facebook can’t track your visit to Heise. Now, this has been implemented below this post and all other posts in the VSA blog, too.
After the first click, an AJAX call is performed and the Facebook Like button is inserted dynamically. The necessary Facebook scripts then load and the usual data Facebook requires is transmitted to the social network. The change means that to Like one of our pages, you need to click twice. On the other hand, this presumably results in the page loading slightly faster. We hope you like it!
Ultimately this saves electricity too and is good for the environment, because facebook servers don’t need to react when pages are accessed on hundreds of thousands of other sites around the world. 🙂