Facebook is becoming the "big brother" George Orwel of 1984, the interesting book with that dystopian world that is not so far from our reality. And even more so when we find out that the downloaded Facebook images include a tracking code.
It is an Australian researcher who has shown that Facebook is including tracking codes on photos that are uploaded to your social network. That is, you download an image already uploaded and it comes with a surprise. Of course, well hidden so that no one knows.
Edin Jusupovic from his Twitter account commented that he discovered a special IPTC instruction when investigating the hex dump of an image downloaded from the social network. In other words, what you get with this tracking code is to be able to track the photos outside of your platform.
It's like they put a GPS on you when leaving a store you have visited to buy anything and then study your behavior. The worst of all is that it seems that the level of precision achieved is overwhelming to be almost absorbed in what Facebook can do in order to get more analytics data.
Those IPTC instructions are metadata watermarks which includes the social network to tag images and thus be able to follow up. Since 2014, it began to erase the metadata of the photos that we upload to include this tracking identifier.
The use for that follow-up, according to Forbes magazine, would be for allow a third party or Facebook itself to link the images with their origins, so they could get more metadata when they are shared again. We will see where all this is, but the Facebook thing would already be to feed them apart because they are believing the owners of the network of networks.