This editorial was published in USA Today on December 11, 2011.

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Facebook’s 800 million users are probably feeling a little more secure since the social media giant agreed to privacy measures forced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) late last month. But they’d be wise to stay cautious. Plenty of incentive for mischief remains, and not only on Facebook.

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The agreement requires Facebook to stop letting users mark their profile information as private and then making it public without their permission. Facebook also promised that it will warn users of privacy policy changes before enacting them.

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But the agreement won’t stop Facebook from monitoring and sharing users’ Web-browsing habits, which is a way for the company and others like it to make money. It’s an unsatisfying ending to a two-year investigation, but more important, it’s a marker of how difficult it will be to maintain privacy in an increasingly wired world.

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The weakness in the FTC’s agreement is that it didn’t establish any guidelines about Internet tracking, the method by which Facebook collects data about its users even when they’re not on the network itself. As company representatives recently acknowledged to USA Today, Facebook automatically compiles a log of every Web page its users visit that has a Facebook plug-in, such as the ubiquitous “like” button.

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Other online giants, such as Google and Yahoo, use similar methods to monitor users’ Web-browsing. This lets them tailor their pages and advertisements to appeal to different visitors.

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Online tracking companies, which help sites compile these browsing records, claim that your personal details are not connected to your name, meaning your privacy is not compromised when they share information with advertisers or others. But as the Wall Street Journal discovered last year, at least one tracking company collected Web surfers’ names and other personally identifiable information and passed it on to clients.

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The implication is that tracking companies and advertisers could know your name, e-mail address, hometown, medical history, political affiliation, and more. Such information could be used in troubling ways. A health insurance company, for example, could guess your medical conditions. Or a potential employer could find out whether you spend your time gambling online.

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If you don’t like that prospect, your only option is to use a Web browser that offers a “Do Not Track” mechanism, such as Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer 9. Once you activate the feature, it signals websites you visit indicating that you do not want your data tracked by third parties. But existing Do Not Track mechanisms can’t control what websites do; they can only communicate your preference.

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That’s why the FTC has called for a tougher and more universal version of Do Not Track, a move that the online advertising industry argues would hamper Internet innovation. These fears are overblown. Behavioral advertising, which targets viewers based on their Web-browsing history, is large and growing, but it still accounts for less than 5% of all online advertising. So ads that rely on tracking are hardly the Internet’s only revenue stream.

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Measures that would create a legally enforceable Do Not Track mechanism or otherwise address privacy concerns are languishing in Congress. Lawmakers should give Web users more tools to control their personal information. Until that happens, your online habits will reveal much more about you than just what you put on your Facebook profile.