Off-Facebook Activity(facebook.com) |
Off-Facebook Activity(facebook.com) |
“But we still keep it and the entire unique fingerprint”
We aren't going to stop tracking you, and "bugs" and "inadvertent" changes may "accidentally" reset your settings.
((facebook containers -> it looks after you))
ironically, posted with Chrome
block all 3rd party cookies, block all trackers, clear cookies on exit, uBlock Origin extension,
and blocking FB related sites in /etc/hosts file
Shouldn’t this incur a rather heavy fine?
We here at Facebook realized you don't trust our apps, so we made another app that makes you think our apps are safe. Despite this just being another app within our portfolio of tracking tools. Please download and install, otherwise the other apps may not work eventually. Trust us. ಠ_ಠ
And data hoarding.
Like when they asked for permition (in a typically snaeky, weasely Facebook way) for permission to suck up your entire phone book data and message history (and even contents) from your Android device?
I want a bunny!
A hard cut from facebook is surprisingly easy. The biggest challenge is getting over the mentality of fear that it will somehow be challenging.
Just because the people you added on facebook filled it with bullshit, doesn’t mean it’s like that for everyone.
I’d love to get away from them, but I have yet to find a workable alternative.
I use Facebook in a container tab in Firefox, completely cut off from my regular browsing. Before that, I used to block it using Privacy Badger.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
"Non-personal events and happenings" are something whose value is worth thinking about. They were one of those things I'm very happy to have optimized away. If it's important, I'll find out about it. Rephrased, I will not make it my responsibility to find out about something you yourself didn't find important enough to tell me about. Reacting to a post is neither taking part in the event nor engaging with the people involved in it. It's this artificial, vicarious interaction that people convince themselves is a valuable addition to their life when in reality it's a fleeting sentence on an infinitely scrolling newsfeed. It replaced the tv show we'd have on in the background but never quite watch. Something mindless yet just engaging enough to take our focus away from doing absolutely nothing at all.
I used to spend my time on facebook finding out about these "non-personal events and happenings", like my cousin's husband's sister's graduation that I never would have attended or been invited to anyway, my aunt's trip to the beach, and some anniversary party a friend and her partner had. Was any of that important? The only difference between being on facebook and being off facebook, is that the former is full of one-way communication where I show minimal engagement with 90% of people's statuses, while the other is a two-way communication where I personally socialize with the 50% of those people who added value to my life. Magically, almost as if humans have evolved to be able to communicate in more ways than one with no effort, I still find out about the significant events.
In my newly-found free time I've become a board member of a large local non-profit, met more of my neighbors and a large chunk of my local government officials, and found time to regularly exercise hard and explore the outdoors.
Personally the most I read on FB is when I’m on the loo and already checked HackerNews ;)
I’ve been trying for years to get people to use XMPP. It worked while GTalk and Messenger used XMPP and worked with it. Nowadays my list contains 0 people.
> Private events, I still find out about.
Some I might, some I might not. And I’d certainly hear about it late and not even be in the discussion about when something happens. Because that happens on FB.
> Reacting to a post is neither taking part in the event nor engaging with the people involved in it. It's this artificial, vicarious interaction that people convince themselves is a valuable addition to their life when in reality it's a fleeting sentence on an infinitely scrolling newsfeed.
You misunderstood me or maybe I expressed myself badly. I mean events where you don’t have a close personal relation to the organizer. A gothic night in a club. The English language meetup. The neighbouring city’s birthday celebrations.
If I stopped using facebook right now, I’d get back less than 5 minutes per day. Unlike so many on HN I never had the problem of somehow being addicted to FB. The site became worse (UX wise) over time and nowadays I don’t even feel slightly compelled to read there.
The result is my feed is pretty free of this garbage.
My block list is probably over 100 of these stupid groups.
I wish it could be exported and shared.
After being off it for a couple of years, whenever I look at someone’s feed I’m absolutely blown away by the saturation of things that are at best ads. It seems like 4/5 items on a timeline would be an update from something that wasn’t a directly-added friend. Facebook shoves the impersonal stuff in my face while all I wanted is the personal stuff.
The product manager in charge said: “people were able to mentally connect that with how their browser controls work, where they can clear their history. We clearly state that … the information isn’t connected to your account.” [0]
So, they deliberately designed it to make people think it works like a browser's clear history feature (which does delete everything), but instead, it 'disconnects' the data (but doesn't delete anything).
Such a bunch of weasels.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/20/facebook-...
I think it's more like a very big weasel and his cult-followers.
Smart, announcing it without it being usable, so when it's silently rolled out later people will have forgotten about it. Never change, FB.
The reality is that once data leaves your device, it's not yours anymore. It will almost certainly be used to track and manipulate you. If someone is talking about giving you control over "your data", it should be a signal that they intend to do the opposite. (like the OP).
Maybe we need to give up this fantasy of "your data" before we can embrace technologies such as ad-blocking, encryption, and frankly abstaining from using abusive software.
(IANAL) At what point can we claim that Terms of Service statements are agreed to under duress, and regain rights to our data as the rightful copyright owner of such data?
So if you don't have FB, presumably you already don't have UID, so you're on equal footing with Facebook users that use this future. They are tracked, but tracking data is not connected to their UIDs.
So there's no change for people not using facebook, you'll be tracked like before no matter what.
EDIT: Any moment now, I suppose it might take a while to type up a thorough, elucidating answer.
Presumably, their tracking is more effective if you simply don’t create an account (so they never rotate the ID).
/Insert a rant about perverse incentives and dark patterns here
I try to post this on every Facebook related post: Leave Facebook. You'll thank yourself a year from now.
Facebook is a morally bankrupt company and the only real fix is to black hole their many domains.
I disagree. It's a typical Facebook step.
Sneaky, shifty and weasely.
Can I delete a private message from your database?
Can I delete your record of a status I wrote from your database?
Can I delete access logs from a website that was using a FB pixel from your database?
“Exciting features include: Cycling through woods! Reading a story in a book made of paper! Now you can control what you see, do and think!”
And all they'd have to do is turn it back on.
I'm not under any illusions they're not trying to track me despite me not having an account with them.
Data collection, according to the GDPR, requires a reason. If I have a Facebook account you're in a relationshio with the company and so they can argue that you agree to providing your data (it's all there in the 12000, or so, "User Agreement".
If you do not use Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp you are not in a business relationship with the company and they have no right to collect and store your data.
I have a feeling that there's a very nasty legal fight with the EU brewing here in a few years time.
Why not make it like a permanent toggle that says “never associate off-Facebook activity with my account (to advertise to me and sell me stuff I don’t need)”?
I don’t see anyone being creeped out or annoyed by “backpack ads” (as seen in that dramatization video of this feature) and still being ok with seeing continuous creepy and annoying ads for shoes or something else later.
Data Re-Identification:
However, I think these activity tools are extremely useful. They allow me to see all (or at least most) of what Facebook/Google has on me and it allows me to practice and implement strategies that prevent the corps from collecting the data in the first place.
> If I disconnect my activity, will I stop seeing ads?
No.
> Does disconnecting my activity mean that it's deleted?
No.
> Why am I seeing businesses I don't recognise?
Because they are creepier than you thought.
Facebooks attempts at making up for their mistakes almost always leave me feeling worse about the company
Is there a similar for iOS that anyone is aware of?
TL;DR: This is a bullshit PR piece to assuage worries that Facebook data-mining the internet. They still are. Move along.
"I am a VP at Facebook and my income is based on how effectively we track and abuse the privacy of the general public, whether or not they are user's or have agreed to any contract with my employer"
I mean it's also worth noting that to access the misleading "clear history" feature you have to create an FB account so they can track you more.
rm -rf /var/tracking_data/jforberg
"How do we delete the data, and still profit from it?"
It’s like designing a dangerous rollercoaster with no concern for safety, and then when people start dying complaining about how hard it was to make it safe.
Nasty, unethical, criminal and morally bankrupt company. There are no other words to describe it.
If I was investing a a GDPR complaint, this article contains a lot of information that would be useful when asking questions to FB.
You're way too optimistic.
You forgot to add the most important reason which should be at the beginning of that sentence - track record.
And also, hiding important financial details e.g. the so called "friendly fraud" case is not a serious mistake, which implies that somehow it all "just happened" and could have "happened to anyone". It was deliberate, a lot of people were complicit, and it is exactly the kind of issue that crosses the fine line between what is merely a "serious mistake" and goes and sits squarely in the realm of "intentional, systematic and deliberate fraud" to pump up the company pre-IPO. And the fact that this came to light about 7-8 years after the actual incident suggests that we have only yet seen the tip of the iceberg on these kinds of issues.
But let us suppose you are actually right that it was just a "serious mistake".
My view is that right now there are a lot more shady things going on inside FB even as you come and write this.
"Well, how can you be so sure?" is what people generally ask. That's exactly what people who were defending FB were asking as early as 2016 on these forums. But over the last 2-3 years, the skeptics have been vindicated, and those folks who were previously defending FB are nowhere to be found on threads which discuss Facebook. As the saying goes - their silence is now deafening.
Assuming this isn't sarcasm, this is how the word prestige is defined - "denoting something that arouses widespread respect or admiration".
Facebook lied to ad buyers (customers) about video views
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...
Facebook lied to users about their spying app
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/03/02/facebook-...
Facebook lied to regulators about its ability to combine user data
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/7/18215143/facebook-whatsapp...
Facebook lied to journalists about the CA issue
https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/qv777x/facebook-lied-to-j...
They don't mind doing mood manipulation experiments
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
They have absolutely no qualms stooping low enough to steal money from kids
https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/facebook-friendly-fr...
Based on the definition above, there is only one prestigious job left at Facebook. Whistle-blower.
"Prestige" in terms of the scale of technical challenges that very few other companies can match at the moment. For many career-focused individuals that is the only thing that matters.
When I read between the lines I see just a nasty attempt at PR to keep naive users & clueless regulators happy by offering the illusion of choice and control over your data.
The reality is that they designed malicious infrastructure akin to a spyware’s command and control center (but at scale, while the other spyware usually gets by with brittle PHP scripts dropped on a hacked shared host) and are now offering you tools to (supposedly) opt-out from a threat they created in the first place.
You might have thought I was making excuses for them. On the contrary, they clearly never designed a system to delete data because the mere idea of actually deleting information associated with a user is so alien to them that they never even thought of it.
I usually try to be as clear as possible, but when it comes to that company I just don't see how anyone could be apologetic for them, so I never read my own post from that perspective.