Facebook hands over your privacy to Booking.com and a number of other websites

Today, all my alarms about internet privacy (or rather lack thereof) rang out loud. I was checking my Facebook wall when I came across one of those ads we’re getting of late: it was Booking.com advertising hotel rooms available in Nazaré (a tiny little village in Portugal). Nothing to worry about, if it weren’t because last night I had been searching for hotels in Nazaré via Booking.com. I was not logged in; my Booking.com email is different from the Facebook one; both emails are not linked in any way… Obviously, then, it was not a coincidence: there is one chance in a million for getting an ad of the same forlorn place I had been checking last night. To my knowledge, there’s only one way this can happen: Booking.com and Facebook.com are interchanging cookies, crossing databases: i.e., they’re telling each other about our private information, so that they can sell us something. I know we’re in the era of zero privacy, yet this is the most shameless and blatant case of handing over private information without consentment that I’ve ever come across. So, beware out there, internauts. They call it “interest-based advertising”.