Report: Facebook has Started Encrypting Links to Counter Browsers' Anti-Tracking Measures (ghacks.net) 163
"Facebook has started to use a different URL scheme for site links," writes the technology blog Ghacks, "to combat URL stripping technologies that browsers such as Firefox or Brave use to improve privacy and prevent user tracking."
Some sites, including Facebook, add parameters to the web address for tracking purposes. These parameters have no functionality that is relevant to the user, but sites rely on them to track users across pages and properties. Mozilla introduced support for URL stripping in Firefox 102, which it launched in June 2022. Firefox removes tracking parameters from web addresses automatically, but only in private browsing mode or when the browser's Tracking Protection feature is set to strict. Firefox users may enable URL stripping in all Firefox modes, but this requires manual configuration. Brave Browser strips known tracking parameters from web addresses as well....
It is no longer possible to remove the tracking part of the URL, as Facebook merged it with part of the required web address.
It is no longer possible to remove the tracking part of the URL, as Facebook merged it with part of the required web address.
Consuming that shit (Score:5, Insightful)
is its own reward.
Why people continue to use Facebook at all is a mystery to me.
Re: Consuming that shit (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yes, but when I smoke at least I get lung cancer and heart disease; what does Facebook give me that's better?
Re: Consuming that shit (Score:4, Funny)
Dain bramage and verbal diarrhoea.
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Mystery? You mean you don't understand why people continue to consume entertainment in exchange for something they don't give even the slightest shit about (privacy)? How out of touch are you?
Find out more by clicking this link which will be reported to Microsoft via Windows, Google via Chrome, Facebook view their tracking, and countless other entities via JavaScript.
And consumers feel what?
Until there is actually a negative impact why would they care? /Disclosure: this post almost certainly tracked by Sams
Re:Consuming that shit (Score:5, Insightful)
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Indeed it does. Your -1 score is completely undeserved. Even if we can block it via no script, it's still valid to point out that EVERYONE is trying to track you.
Re: Consuming that shit (Score:2)
Who the hell loads web pages without Disconnect and ABP? Lol. Trackers....
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Complain to your government. They should have their own website, your taxes are being wasted.
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Our taxes may be wasted, but the web site for the tax authorities is pretty good. Lots of information, lots of ways to contact them, and filing the tax returns usually takes less than five minutes.
The AC poster is sprouting alternative facts.
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Complain to your government. They should have their own website, your taxes are being wasted.
Far worse, your communication with your government depends on the whim of a vast multinational corporation.
Not good.
Re:Consuming that shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, in Sweden the government relies on Facebook, and Facebook alone? No website with chat, no email, no Twitter?
That's appalling.
Re:Consuming that shit (Score:5, Informative)
No, it is not true at all. On top of (usually) very good online self service, government and authorities, as well as banks and insurance companies, have web sites, phones, email, and chat. Some branches also have in-person service locations. I haven't seen any of them refer to Facebook (or Twitter).
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Correction: I just saw that the web site of one of the most prominent government services, the tax authorities, furthest down on the list of contact methods mention that they exist on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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Re:Consuming that shit (Score:4, Informative)
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I ask for another way to interact and I'm provided blank stares. Don't ask for email, you can see the gag reflex they put on. Pretty pathetic.
The hopeful person in me says that this is the frame here and not that Sweden doesn't provide its own information portals and that it uses facesbook's like a kiosk for the sake of convenience of
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Using Facebook is the only good way to contact the Swedish government? That seems to run counter to a lot of the smugness I see posted here regarding the supposed superiority of European governments...
Twitter has been doing this forever (Score:4, Informative)
Not that it is any less annoying, but that's not a new discovery by FB.
Re:Twitter has been doing this forever (Score:4, Informative)
No it hasn't. Twitter links encode tracking in the URL without any obfuscation, and are trivial to strip. Their links take this format:
https://twitter.com/%5Baccount [twitter.com] name]/status/[tweet ID]?s=[share type]&t=[unique tracker]
You can strip the share type and unique tracker, and the links still work just fine. There is no encryption at all.
Re:Twitter has been doing this forever (Score:5, Informative)
Edit: Should have used preview, trying again...
No it hasn't. Twitter links encode tracking in the URL without any obfuscation, and are trivial to strip. Their links take this format:
hxxps://twitter.com/[account name]/status/[tweet ID]?s=[share type]&t=[unique tracker]
You can strip the share type and unique tracker, and the links still work just fine. There is no encryption at all. The following works just fine:
hxxps://twitter.com/[account name]/status/[tweet ID]
Re:Twitter has been doing this forever (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it has, you're referring to sharing tweets, which Twitter embeds easy-to-remove tracking information in because there's not really any way for them to avoid it. (The tweet ID has to be somewhere, and once you have that, you can create the link to the tweet.) However, links within a tweet have an un-removable tracking ID.
The way it works is that any link you make in a tweet is automatically converted to a t.co link which is basically just t.co/random ID. The t.co link in return sends you through analytics.twitter.com (gee, wonder what that's for) before redirecting you to the original link. (No, I couldn't tell you why it has to start at t.co and then forward to analytics.twitter.com before forwarding to the real destination. You'd think they could do the tracking within the t.co handler, but apparently not.)
Twitter claims this benefits the user in two ways: first, it's an automatic link shortening service. You only "use up" however many characters are in the t.co link, rather than in the original URL. The second thing it lets them do is block "harmful" links. (It's unclear to me if they just flat-out prevent you from going to the original destination, or if they just warn you, and it's unclear what "harmful" means.)
But in any case, Twitter has made it impossible to prevent Twitter from tracking you when you visit websites through Twitter for ages, because the only way you can get the original URL is by going through the t.co "URL shortening" system. Well, sort of: a display version of the URL is also within a tweet's metadata, so that when the tweet is "rendered" via the client, you don't see the t.co link, instead you see at least part of the original URL. (So sometimes you could avoid t.co by manually typing in the URL, but if it's "too long," there's no way to get it without going through t.co and analytics.twitter.com.)
Re:Twitter has been doing this forever (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Twitter has been doing this forever (Score:2)
Does Twitter really use a double redirect? Wow that's crappy if you care about page loading speed.
Custom schemes? (Score:3)
How? I can understand how this might work on Android, where you can register an intent handler to process URLs with a custom scheme, but are they also installing software on desktop computers? And even if they are, how do they get Firefox to go to the page without translating it back to a standard scheme which is then liable to be processed by the same URL sanitising code?
Re: Custom schemes? (Score:2)
The FB pixel/etc Javascript code that companies add to their page gets to sniff this on the URL. (Along with all other parameters.... :-O )
Does adding trackers to your company's webpage allow them to sniff every login/good bits? Hahaha. Company's marketing team: "do it! It's fun!"
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If you're executing JS then you've already loaded the page, so this doesn't answer my question as to how the page gets loaded if the browser doesn't know what to do with the URL. Browsers support a rather limited set of schemes: http, https, about, file, data, maybe ftp (although I think most of them have dropped it), maybe one or two others. How is Twitter or Facebook telling them what to do with a custom://foo.bar/quux URL?
Next Step: Lobbying! (Score:3)
So the next logical step for Facebook would be to start lobbying for a law that makes it illegal to "Modify URLs".
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So the next logical step for Facebook would be to start lobbying for a law that makes it illegal to "Modify URLs".
You're fast. They're on it. They're establishing new child companies in every state and filing in each one to gain precedent. Filing should start in.... oh, wait, it's 2022 and everything has slowed to a crawl. They should start filing suits and lobbying in about 3-9 years. /humor ... or is it?
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I thought I heard somewhere a few years ago, modifying the URL in the browser is (or will be?) considered 'hacking' (cracking).
I thought years ago someone backspaced on the URL, got into the system and was jailed.
Doing anything on a computer is hacking/cracking. You only get caught when an entity has something to gain from it. Just don't get into any groups or anything. Down with the social interaction! Uh, oh, wait, that encourages more of it. I'm confused. /humor
Re: Next Step: Lobbying! (Score:4)
Not exactly innocent.
Easy solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Putting the tracking information into the URL itself, instead of as an extra parameter is not magic, or even difficult. Scummy, yes, but then, Facebook is a scummy company.
There is no option currently to prevent Facebook's tracking of users via links. Users could avoid Facebook, but that may not be possible all the time.
It's perfectly possible. I haven't been on Facebook in years. The very few businesses dumb enough to have only a Facebook page and no website? They clearly don't need my business.
Re:Easy solution (Score:5, Informative)
Facebook tracks you and your browsing habits even if you don't formally have a Facebook account. It does so with embedded "like" buttons and other facebook content on websites that ends up tracking you.
Facebook once bragged that it could uniquely identify, by name, 90% of all American internet users by their browsing habits, even if they did not have a Facebook account.
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Re:Easy solution (Score:5, Informative)
These only eliminate one class of tracking mechanisms, the kind that depend on quick-and-dirty inclusion of a javascript module in a web page. These tools have no effect on tracking mechanisms that are programmed into the server side of the code.
Re: Easy solution (Score:2)
TIL: FB pixel server side code. Why the hell would people do this? Lol. So that way FB doesn't just control your user's browser, but they can read your .env, connect to your "internal" DB, cause all sorts of trouble? To give them access to hack other internal resources? Lol. WTF?
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Here's a link to the actual Facebook server-side tracking "pixel": https://segment.com/docs/conne... [segment.com].
Why would anybody do this? Well, because Facebook tracking is a welcome "intruder" for most web sites. In exchange for sharing your data with Facebook, you get lots of "free" marketing analytics from Facebook.
Same with Google Analytics. You hand over every click to Google, they give you free analytics about your users.
The motivation is powerful. Every site wants this kind of analytics so badly that nearly al
Re:Easy solution (Score:4, Informative)
And more reputable sites (possibly due to some EU law, since I tend to see that on EU pages only) now hide those "like" buttons behind a "click here to enable Facebook links" link.
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Yep, all three of those "more reputable" sites.
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Yep, all three of those "more reputable" sites.
They're up to three? Where was the grande announcement of the third? /humor
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They're actually not that uncommon. Mostly European news outlets.
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Or so you've been led to believe.
Take The Guardian for example. It doesn't take long to find out that even if you turn off "all" tracking cookies, there are some that cannot be turned off: https://support.theguardian.co... [theguardian.com]
These include cookies that are shared with a third party "contributions" manager.
GDPR doesn't tell sites they are not allow to track, they just have to disclose and ask for consent.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
IIRC, I personally signed off of Facebook back when Trump was first coming to power. (Don't recall if he was still running, or if it was after he'd been sworn in, but around that time IIRC). I have not signed on again since. Took about 2 weeks to break the muscle memory of bringing
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I honestly cannot see why anyone would need such a place as facebook, twitter, reddit, or linkedin. The "need" is self-inflicted; it's possible to live without them.
But it does "turn you into a loner" if you don't give in to the crap. We weren't loners before, but we "became" loners when we didn't give in to facebook et al.
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I honestly cannot see why anyone would need such a place as facebook, twitter, reddit, or linkedin. The "need" is self-inflicted; it's possible to live without them.
But it does "turn you into a loner" if you don't give in to the crap. We weren't loners before, but we "became" loners when we didn't give in to facebook et al.
Amen. I was more transitional (and I'll admit _THAT_ was a stupid waste of effort). I didn't follow the sheep into the crap apps (they started as sites, but we all know what ends up happening). I was a loner. I figured something was out of place in my head when everyone seems to be getting into this social thing that brings so many together and gives them so much to talk about and share, so I gave in.
I was lied to head-on. A friend (found him again after HS on FB) said he was busy with family stuff and
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However, the longer we have been here, the less Fa
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Your second paragraph reads like a newbie in addiction recovery.
Whether your presentation was deliberate or sincere, it's consistent with FB's well-documented manipulation of the dopaminergic reward system.
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... manipulation of the dopaminergic reward system.
Now, now. Don't let the (ab)users of it get information like that in their heads. They'll start to want to know more about what dopamine is and how it's being used to affect their daily decisions and feelings... wait, what in the hell am I talking about? Their attention wouldn't stay on your comment long enough to make it there. :) /humor, and so true at the same time. Gag.
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Just like any habitual behavior, you'll find yourself starting to do something before you even realize you are doing it. Getting up to go get a snack from the kitchen before you recall your diet. Waking up early for work on a Saturday, before remembering and going back to bed. Reaching for the light switch be
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Facebook users simply organize into echo chambers over time. The "abuse" reporting system is so malicious that you have to go into private groups to share any interesting content. I don't see that cuckservative bullshit because I'm not consuming random content.
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Facebook users simply organize into echo chambers over time. The "abuse" reporting system is so malicious that you have to go into private groups to share any interesting content. I don't see that cuckservative bullshit because I'm not consuming random content.
Could you convince my SO to try that? I'll start my comment to you something she said about two weeks ago, (roughly), with complete sincerity and as a warning and helpful advice: "You'd better go and stock up on mustard, because there's a shortage of it right now."
I'm saying this because it came from "keeping up with the friends" on Facebook but of COURSE following side links and whatever you call the silly-worded picture things to more picture things to some article that someone posted that stated there's
Re:Easy solution (Score:4, Informative)
People think Slashdot is somehow immune, but look at what happens when someone says anything remotely positive about Trump or questions liberal talking points.
The same thing that happens when someone says anything negative about him. Moderation happens. I've been modded down again and again for sharing facts about Trump's past. If you think Slashdot is a liberal echo chamber, you are absolutely not even paying attention. There is a massive cadre of libertarians here, and no actual shortage of full authoritarian right-wingers either.
lol (Score:3)
GP foe'd me after I wrote parent comment
Genuine lol
Re:Easy solution (Score:4, Informative)
Taxes are still near historic lows. So even if they are marginally higher than they were under Trump, that doesn't make them high in any absolute sense. When I was born the top marginal tax rate was 70%, today it is 40% [bradfordtaxinstitute.com]
Inflation is a GLOBAL problem, not driven by the US. In fact, the US is experience far less inflation than many other countries. We are not even in the top 10 [inflation.eu] for average inflation at the moment, and the US inflation rate (8.3%) is not much higher than those ranked 11 (8.48%) to 20 (6.43%)
Gas price are also a global commodity, and therefore not under the direct control of the US president or any other part of the government. As of right now there is more demand (100.23 million barrels/d) for oil than production (95.56 million barrels/d) globally [eia.gov], and that is driving up prices...GLOBALLY. Biden has allowed sales of the strategic reserve to try and relieve pressure, but there really isn't much else ANYONE can do about oil prices. At least within the US.
The standard of living has been dropping for decades. Over the last 30 years all most all Americans have seen their share of the national wealth shrink. [usafacts.org]The exceptions being the bottom 20% (2.9% in both 1989 and 2021), and the top 20% (43.5% in both 1989 and 2021).
- The 2nd 20% saw their share nearly halved from 7.4 to 4.1%
- The 3rd 20% experienced nearly twice as large a decline from 12.3 to 7.3 %
- The 4th 20% bracket saw a much more moderate drop from 16.7 to 15.4.
- Interestingly, within the top 20%, the 19% actually lost share to the top 1%.
Whereas the top 20% remained flat, the top 1% (which is included in the top 20%) saw enormous gains in share of wealth from 17.2% to 27%. That means that the those from 20% to 99% all more-or-less lost wealth to the top 1%. Biden was president for 2 of those 31 years, so please explain to me how that is in anyway his fault in particular. Sure, the democrats are not blameless in that, but it is in no way a new thing, or unique to Biden/democratic presidencies.
You can continue to believe what you are told by those best positioned to profit by lying to you, or you can actually fact check their assertions and learn the truth yourself. My father was never one to fact check anyone, and doesn't have the education necessary to do so even if he wanted to. It's not a good excuse for his behavior, but it is at least AN excuse. By virtue of your participation on
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You not clicking a Facebook link doesn't mean you have in any way avoided Facebook. All it means is you haven't consumed any content in exchange for all the data they harvested from you anyway without you knowing.
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It's perfectly possible. I haven't been on Facebook in years.
You have, you just don't know about it. Go to any website with a facebook icon on it or a share by Facebook and Facebook is tracking your information, even if you've never had a Facebook account and if you sign up you'll find your feed magically filled with the stuff you're interested in. The websites also don't even need those obvious links to Facebook, google "Facebook pixel".
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Putting the tracking information into the URL itself, instead of as an extra parameter is not magic, or even difficult. Scummy, yes, but then, Facebook is a scummy company.
Please don't read on if you don't want to read about what FB influences in a person's mind and what that does to a relationship...
My significant other got into the smo^H^H^Hfacebook addiction when someone she was a friend with did, years ago. Now, I'll go home from work this evening and she will walk in the door about 2 hours later post-work. She pushes the computer power button as she walks past it into a room to change out of work clothes. She uses that time to let the machine boot. She gets a drink a
Like every link shortener has done before (Score:3)
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Just avoid sites that garble links.
In other words, stay off the internet?
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> Just avoid sites that garble links.
Nah. I wrote a mod_perl module c. 2002 to handle
https://example.com/encryptedp... [example.com]
to avoid HIPAA problems with web proxies for docs checking on their patients or using shared machines.
The cookies were encrypted too. Even on a single Pentium III 800 server the performance was not measurable beyond noise of the sampling tool.
The worse risk is letting G-d knows who see your links.
It's more likely to be spyware post-Snowden than proxies but the premise should alwa
Dont click ads (Score:2)
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You don't have to click on an ad to be tracked by it. If the ad gets displayed, the server already knows you saw it.
Wrong approach (Score:5, Interesting)
People who actively avoid and/or block this tracking stuff are actually doing the advertisers a huge favor by self-selecting themselves out of the pool of people who they're paying to annoy. The companies profiting off this depend on stupid people and actively target them with these tactics. What we need are browsers and services that virtually click on everything, all the time, multiple times, pretend to follow every ad, show interest in all of it. Flood these fuckers with noise and pay-for-click fees.
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The companies profiting off this depend on stupid people and actively target them with these tactics.
You forget that companies that rely on social media advertising, when it is well-known that a) it doesn't work as people trained to ignore it b) it mostly reaches bots anyways, are run by stupid people.
Re:Wrong approach (Score:4, Informative)
This extensions exists, and it's called AdNauseum [adnauseam.io]. I'm sure it wouldn't surprise you to learn that it was available in the Chrome "web store" until Google realized what it actually does. They then categorized it as malware and revoked the developer's signing key.
The extension does have a fairly heavy footprint in terms of CPU time and network transfer, but that's only because of how pervasive advertising dreck is.
Sounds highly illegal (Score:5, Informative)
At least in the EU under the GDPR. The GDPR prohibits tracking without explicite, informed consent and mandates that all access needs to be possible without it, except where necessary, e.g. session-tracking. But that information may not be stored after the session ends.
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That's an interesting point. I don't recall Twitter asking me for explicit permission to track where I post links. They certainly didn't ask anyone who takes that link and shares it themselves.
Their get-out might be that the tracking is anonymous, and thus not personal data. It's a tricky one because it's difficult to prove that the links are not anonymous, or can't be de-anonymized trivially.
This may require some further research.
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I'd argue that it's actually been proven again and again that "Anonymous tracking" simply doesn't exist.
Once your dataset is large enough, you can *always* collate what's what and who's who.
And I'm pretty sure that the datasets of the companies in question are large enough.
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Very likely. The problem is going to be gathering enough evidence to get a regulator interested, or enough to launch legal action to force them to take an interest.
None Of Your Business (NOYB) does work in that area. You could contact them maybe.
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Once your dataset is large enough, you can *always* collate what's what and who's who.
You can't be argued with because it exists and is paid for every day. It's not a Google or a 'tracking site over there'. One's called Lexis Nexis. And that's just one of them. Auto insurance companies use some of them, banks, of course, do beyond "credit bureaus"... Ugh.
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At least in the EU under the GDPR. The GDPR prohibits tracking without explicite, informed consent
If you click a tracked link from a 3rd party site to Facebook and you don't have a currently logged in Facebook session cookie, you will hit a landing page informing you you're going to Facebook and will be tracked along with the option to not do it.
This has been in place since the GDPR.
Pi-Hole blocks all FB domains (Score:2)
You just need to be a little more creative. Buy a Raspberry Pi and use Pi-Hole. Blocks FB domains at the network level, with domain lists automatically updated.
Reminds me of buying ant killer this year... (Score:2)
...doesn't matter how much poison you throw at them, if it's not a form that gets back to the queen you're just pissing in the wind.
Win-win (Score:2)
If a site's URL breaks my browser's privacy rules or my third-party security app's protection, I don't load the page.
Simple.
Why people continue to use firefox is a mystery to (Score:2)
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Apparently Mark Zuckerberg has followed Putin's example and has his own army of online trolls.
con-man like theft (Score:5, Insightful)
The first and only time I attempted to get an account was ~3 months ago.
The only reason I tried was that it's the best way to get support for a boat I purchased. I could contact the manufacturer for large issues, but high performance sailboats have a lot more to them and the manufacturer isn't going to post tuning guides or facilitate community discussions for "which product works best for this issue", "has anyone tried this", "who's going to which regatta X", and similar discussions.
Getting back on point, when I tried to join, FB gathered an email address, phone number, and some other information from me. Then presented me with a list of people I might know - some accurate, some not. I then went through and adjusted any setting that I thought was against my interests and privacy. Other than changing settings, the only task I did was search for one name. I then left to take care of something. About an hour later, I returned and was locked out with a message stating that I violated an unspecified policy and my account was locked. The only way I could get it reinstated was to go through some web process which then demanded a picture of me to confirm my identity. I don't know what they would compare it to since I never provided a picture. Emails to their abuse email address have been ignored. In a nutshell, they grabbed info I would not have otherwise given them. Have given me nothing in return. Kicked me off without explanation and then wanted my picture to, presumably, complete their data set. It's not hard to feel like I was digitally robbed by a con man. I wish there was a way to force them to purge my information, but I haven't found one.
It isn't a technological problem,... (Score:5, Insightful)
Legislation & effective oversight are long overdue. The EU's GDPR doesn't go far enough either.
poisoning the tracking data (Score:2)
This noise effort [makeinternetnoise.com] targets google specifically, but not the embedded page or ISP trackers. There's also this python script [github.com] that could be set up as a cron job on an idle raspberry pi looking for justification not
Why is anyone still using Facebook, again? (Score:2)
Here's my question... (Score:3)
So, they've now encrypted the method that they do the tracking. If someone were to try to reverse engineer that so as to make, say, a browser extension to once again remove the tracking, would that violate the DMCA?
I ask because suddenly it would seem that if you wanted to do almost anything nefarious such as this tracking, just put even the thinnest tissue paper of security or encryption on it and then let the law take over. Hell, for all I know this has already been done years ago.
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I called it (Score:2)
Crapbook, Boogle, Kelp, and all the others (Score:2)
One of the quickest ways to lose my business is to have your primary contact be some shit show like Facebook. If I click on a link for your product and am presented with a Facebook login page, we're done. Another way to lose my business is to have some shit around like "Rate us 5 stars on {Facebook,Google,Yelp}".
I just left a company that determined its employees' livelihood by some bullshit web ratings. Every time a customer left they got texted a link to "rate us on (censored)". Most people ignored it.
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Fuck you and fuck your incessant tracking.
Slashdot.org, site information: 23 cookies in use, 11 trackers blocked.
Re:Great, Meta! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Great, Meta! (Score:4, Interesting)
Keep using uBO. 100%. Most of the "AdBlock" ones, including uBlock (not Origin) have eventually been sold to ad companies. Raymond Hill isn't going to do that.
If you want to micromanage, you can (also or alternatively) install uMatrix which is likewise run by Hill, but there's a learning curve. It's kind of like an interactive firewall for classes of elements.
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/. itself doesn't use tracking links.
The level of tracking attempt on Slashdot has varied wildly during the current era. I left my browser open for a couple hours on the front page and came back one day to find thousands of attempts to load some bullshit. This doesn't happen now, though. I have a ton of addons loaded to block stuff. Right now UO, noscript, adblock plus, clearurls are all showing blocked elements on this comment entry page, although to be fair only some of those are trackers.
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/. itself doesn't use tracking links.
The level of tracking attempt on Slashdot has varied wildly during the current era. I left my browser open for a couple hours on the front page and came back one day to find thousands of attempts to load some bullshit. This doesn't happen now, though. I have a ton of addons loaded to block stuff. Right now UO, noscript, adblock plus, clearurls are all showing blocked elements on this comment entry page, although to be fair only some of those are trackers.
Good data!
I have a question, and you seem like you have the kind of brain to understand the question. I can't form an educated and backed opinion in my own head without seeing that someone else "gets it" or tells me how far off I am.
The question is: Sooo, where's the line? Extended version: Let's say FB and /. are tracking. Okay, we've talked about FB and there's plenty of data and info to show what they do with it. The 'line' question comes in on things like this. Let me give an example to explain wha
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
And that's the point of the article. They can continue to track you because the link you are clicking (in incognito mode) contains tracking information and you're sending it to them as part of the URL.
And when you click a link on a facebook page, (to go to another Facebook page, or anywhere else) they continue to track you to the next page,
This is all a result of them "packing" the tra
Re:Great, Meta! (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no innocent excuse for this change. none. They're tracking people that don't want to be tracked. It's that simple.
No surprise since that is the basis of their business model; and will do what it takes to defeat privacy safeguards by anyone who develops or uses them.
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Well, I guess my years of not using Facebook are certainly coming to a middle.
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You may not use Facebook directly, but I'm sure Meta has a Shadow Profile about you.
I think they meant "coming to a Meta".
Okay, okay, I know it was a cheap and easy one. I'm walking off stage, please don't throw stuff at me.
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... I wonder what it'll take for the big public to catch on and stop using these abusive data-hoarding bullies.
I agree with everything else you said, but I wonder at your optimism here and wish I could share it. If the "big public" was capable of catching on I think it would already have happened.
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... I wonder what it'll take for the big public to catch on and stop using these abusive data-hoarding bullies.
I agree with everything else you said, but I wonder at your optimism here and wish I could share it. If the "big public" was capable of catching on I think it would already have happened.
I'm with ya. Sadly, I believe it will only happen when it's forced to (and I don't think that's going to happen if you make it to the end of this comment). Something like a nuclear war or an externally-sourced EMP or Solar event that's enough to take out the electronics. Taken out to the point where you can't say, "I'm paying for this and the provider needs to make it come back NOW because I'M PAYING for it!" When the provider(S) can't do that, literally cannot, and there's no competition between who ca
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...That's forced tracking right there....
Agreed, but to be legal and correct, we'd have to convince a generation of people and certain ones that have been sucked in (my fiancee is one), that want and need are two different things. The definition in their head of what's "needed" to be entertained and have "friends", real or not, is not the same as their want of the same. To change that definition where it can be applied to a legal case would take a huge proof of psychological dependence on immaterial services as a "need" for a healthy life (or g
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