Facebook Users Complain of New Ad-Based Tracking 173
Tech.Luver noted a story about facebook users complaining over ads where their shopping habits are shared with their friends as if they are endorsing products. The neatest part is that you can opt out- if you click a box that disappears after 20 seconds... wait to long, and they assume you are totally fine with it.
My favorite part of Facebook (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I guess accuracy is too much to hope for (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I guess accuracy is too much to hope for (Score:2, Interesting)
The site has to install a small bit of code which creates the cookie.
I'm not entirely sure if Firefox etc. sees them as 3rd party cookies or not.
The suggestion that others have made of blocking
So, there are ways around it.
What annoys me, and from what I've seen, a lot of Facebook users, is that it's opt out on a site by site basis, unless you happen to know a lot about how it works. Which the average Facebook user doesn't, and while there are arguments that all internet users should be aware of all these tricks, I, personally, think that it's not really very fair of Facebook to work on the assumption that many don't know how to avoid it.
Faceook Architecture (Score:5, Interesting)
I use Firefox exclusively with NoScript installed. I clicked on the link, and... What the hell am I doing on this completely different site? And why is it trying to run JavaScript at me? Further, why is it trying to run a cross-site script from Facebook?
It was at this point that I began to suspect that the pages Facebook is presenting me are not, in fact, always generated by Facebook's servers, but instead can be cobbled together from any number of sites and servers located anywhere, and that these sites all exchange data transparently with Facebook.
I haven't read their developer's pages or their API specification, so I'm only guessing here. Does anyone know if this is in fact true?
Because if it is -- to borrow one of Jon Stewart's terms -- then it's an absolute catastrofuck of a design, and everyone but everyone should run screaming from Facebook as fast as they can.
Schwab
Re:Faceook Architecture (Score:3, Interesting)
I still get "X has invited you to Y Z" every other day. I wish I could turn them all off.
Information leaks and "SkyNet" (Score:4, Interesting)
Who cares about this? What's important is the long-term trend. Computers are networked. They are growing in power and complexity at an exponential rate. The algorithms for data processing and pattern-recognition software are being worked out at lightning speed.
Computers are sharing information. And, once leaked, it's basically impossible to contain it. And once leaked, this information is available for an indeterminate period of time - forever?
Why forever? Since storage capacity is growing exponentially, the need to purge old data is dropping exponentially, too. I have, on DVD, a hard disk image of my entire computer at around 1999. It's about 1 GB of data, and was a real hassle to get together back when I made it. But now, I've got a copy in a folder in my home directory on my Laptop, which has 160 GB HDD. It's not enough space for me to care - my disk usage is floating around 75% now, including my entire MP3 collection. (which dwarfs my old HDD)
I'm probably going to keep that old disk image, along with its ancient copy of freecell.exe forever. Not because I care at all about freecell.exe, but because the cost of actually deleting that file is far greater than the cost of keeping it around.
And so it is with leaked, marginally valuable information - the cost of leaving it "hanging around" is lower than the cost of identifying exactly what it is and deleting it. So this leaked information tends to "stick around" forever, and we have pattern recognition, AI, and search algorithms improving rapidly, which dramatically reduces the cost of identifying and reprocessing this marginal information. The end result is a human/machine meta-creature, a sort of swarm-like social animal like ants but with a common, shared intellect, lots like the GAIA from (you guessed it!) Asimov's Foundation series! [wikipedia.org]
Asimov was a visionary in more ways than one...
Guess I'm rambling. I'll stop now.