Following criticism over privacy breach, social networking giant Facebook has pledged to fix the issue within 24 hours.

Australia-based security consultant & blogger Nik Cubrilovic had complained that Facebook had been tracking his online activities even after he logged out of the social network.

In his blog, Mr. Cubrilovic claimed that Facebook had been delivering "cookies" that were collecting identifiable information by tracking his visits to other websites.

Mr. Cubrilovic confirmed that he had spoken to Facebook's US-based engineers and communication staff, and they had assured that the privacy breach would be fixed within 24 hours.

Speaking to The Australian, Mr. Cubrilovic confirmed, "They aim to fix it (the logout issue) by tomorrow. There will still be cookies, but they won't be identifiable. That's within 24 hours."

Cookies can be described as small computer files which can gather information about a user as surf on the internet. Collected information can be sent out to remote servers for analysis.

But, Facebook engineer Gregg Stefancik argued that browser cookies were not designed to track logged-out users, claiming that they were designed to provide custom content, maintain and maintain the service.