i've always assumed all that stuff was a way for facebook to track my users - so have never been keen to use or recommend.

i suspect they benefit some type of sites much more than others - not so much sites selling products.

i'm not at al suprised that this idea is being put forward.

there is change afoot regarding 'personal data' ... and i'm pretty sure that any legislation will not actually benefit users in any way.

It has consequences far beyond like buttons. Any external resource might be tracking users.

You need to ensure that anything you load on a page on your site is not allowing the gathering of personally identifiable information.

This is warning that third party stuff of all kinds might be subject to scrutiny. I suspect many will do a re-think.

The vast majority of websites get little to no benefit from a like button. It's safe to remove and protecting yourself from this latest court order is probably not even one of the biggest reasons why you should. Every pageview that has a like button provides Facebook data about your visitors, for free, to use as they please.

Just noticed one local tv station has removed their "Like us on Facebook" and all SM buttons. Not sure when that happened as for many years I have had like button blindness.

This is the code I use:

<span class="icon icon-share-fb"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?s=100&p[url]=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fcurrent_page.html&p[images][0]=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fimages%2Fimage_tile.jpg&p[title]=text+title&p[summary]=page+summary" target="_blank">Share on Facebook</a>
</span>

CSS class="icon icon-share-fb" has its local image assigned to it.

.icon-share-fb {
 background-image: url(/assets/img/facebook.png);
}
[class*="icon-share-"] {
 float: left;
 min-height: 1px;
 padding-right: 5px;
}
.icon {
 background-position: left center;
 background-repeat: no-repeat;
 padding-left: 22px;
 padding-right: 8px;
}

From my understanding REF will be passes to FB only if the user clicks on the FB button, that is it. Same goes for all other SM Buttons.

If one does not want even a referrer to be liked just add rel=noreferrer attribute to HREF.

What visitors do on my sites is nobodies biz...

+1 with @blend27

I do propose buttons to my visitors, if they want to share pages on Twitter, Facebook , but I do not use their plugin. I use direct links. It does the same, without the tracking. The plugins bring nothing more, and worse they slow down pages, beside harvesting data. Also, third parties external code is always a bad idea, you never know that this code can do or will do. (external js code can modify your pages, redirect users, etc...). Keep the control.

@blend27, that is (implementation details aside) what I always do if the client wants social sharing buttons.

I do not encourage them as I think @JS_Harris is right and most sites get little benefit from them.

I feel really happy about this. My long standing advice has been proved right, and people who have chosen to do the right thing and not help FB track their users have been rewarded because they do not have to change anything.

not help FB track their users have been rewarded because they do not have to change anything

Whew! Most of us have too much to do already. :)

Personally never saw the purpose ... FB, even back then, was a time sink and once folks got there, few ever came back.

Personally never saw the purpose ... FB, even back then, was a time sink and once folks got there, few ever came back.

A lot of business owners and managers that everything they post on FB is seen by everyone why as liked their FB page, that everyone who likes the page is a potential customer, and generally that unicorns turn FB likes into sales.

FB like button, it is amazingly useful for traffic and conversion of visitors into loyal readers and sales </sarcasm>. I performed an accidental test posting an article on the official FB fanpage of X website and it got a lot of traffic and likes, it's amazing because validated FB accounts clicked the like button and **it showed on my private FB stats**. Nice, FB just helped me to get traffic, unfortunately the article link was broken so what really happened is people were clicking on a button regarding an article they never read, an article of a page they never visited. Their likes only represented someone clicked on something that has some text and a picture, but nothing really important happened.

The ** stands for a reference to how in the past FB has accepted their stats are not accurate, not in the term of "not exact" but in the term of being inflated. But let's go on with the FB like button, now on the website pages. You have to place it on top of your page, remember? this means people will click "like" even if they never read half the article. Place it at the bottom? it's somehow a more realistic like.

But there is a problem... The FB like snippet is short, but it adds a lot of weight to your webpage, why? because it's not really an image, it's a call for a lot of code you didn't ask for and you didn't agree. Wait, did you agree to the button? hell, how can you agree to something YOU-DON'T-KNOW-WHAT-IT-DOES?, what were you agreeing to?

Tracking?, the amount of code the FB buttons insert on your website means a lot of tracking, don't believe me? try yourself, not to mention it inflates your website.

FB like button? I would just have to hit the "dislike" button this time. No thanks.