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Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

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Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#191

Post by jonny_eh »

fouric wrote: post #90
tanto wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your weed dealer provide the service for free? If you want to be treated as a $$$ paying customer start paying. Problem with social networks and $$$ is that network effects will not come into effect as not everyone will be willing to pay. There are actually ethical information dealers but they require you to pay them as you are paying your weed dealer.

Most internet service companies, including Facebook and Google, don't give you the option of paying for privacy even if you wanted to.

I happily pay for YouTube Premium, just to avoid ads. I wish I could do the same with Facebook

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#192

Post by dylan604 »

pixl97 wrote: post #175
qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a perfect example of the need for physical comparmentation. Separate devices never connected through the same internet service. As far as devices go, to think you have separated “anything” on only one device, you’re living in fantasyland.

If the app can look at your wireless, even that is not enough. It can just make a map of the SSID/BSSID around you.

Statements like this make me want to learn phone OS development just so I can have a better understanding on what information an app can get from the OS. Honest question, why would an app ever need to know the SSID of a wireless network? The app should only care if there is a valid network connection, and then use it. I can see being able to know if it is wifi vs cellular so they can have the option to limit large downloads to wifi only. However, the SSID would not be necessary information for the app.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#193

Post by asaph »

kozikow wrote: post #178
jsjohnst wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just as my email addresses have That doesn’t need to be the case though with just a little bit of effort and minimal cost. Use your own domain for email and set your account to be a catchall. Then use facebook.com@yourdomain.tld and your email address is no longer a cross site unique identifier.

You can do it with Gmail to some extent already. E.g. instead of using myemail@gmail.com I would use myemail+facebook@gmail.com. Gmail ignores anything after the plus. As someone mentioned, marketing companies usually share just the hash of email. The trick is not too popular and I didn't experience a company handling it yet.

The "trick" is both popular and commonly made to be moot by programmers. Source: I know programmers at multiple companies that have written production code to strip the +suffix from the username portion of gmail addresses.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#194

Post by sambull »

da02 wrote: post #183
spr1ted wrote: post #156

People of multiple platforms dislike me for discrediting facebook. Simply talking about facts and what they could expect. They think they know it all. Some corps are good some are evil. People tend to forget that an evil person could also be your most trusted and reliable one. I work as a cyber security engineer and the things i have see flying by are crazy. The fact that information is sold without you4 knowledge is…

What are some crazy things you've seen?

Not related to private data but I've seen a bank shadow fund a project to get the mortgage review packages of a competitor to run through their models and test them out, also giving this one bank all the data on the mortgage packages and the scores. A really big bank did this to two others BIG lenders (one lender directly related to the federal government). We were instructed to turn a blind eye and the business model was exfiltrating info to a different lending institution while the auspice is we were only building a product as a service. My personal opinion is ALL your data is being sold. Every single bit that can be collected will be sold with no protections, regulations.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#195

Post by asaph »

magicalhippo wrote: post #136

It's also entirely what I expected, hence why I haven't given Facebook my number. Not sure why anyone is surprised by this to be honest.

Facebook probably knows your phone number anyway because your friends have likely shared their phone's contacts with Facebook.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#196

Post by da02 »

inetknght wrote: post #190
krageon wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need his crazy stories, really. All you need to do is accept that Facebook isn't behaving exceptionally poorly, this is industry standard. Lo and behold - the entire sector is suddenly a cesspool of disrespect and money grabbing at the cost of your data, your privacy, anything they will be able to get away with. And they can get away with a lot, because you are not allowed to talk when you work anywhere. On…

@da02 asked @spr1ted for some examples and you come in saying he's crazy and deny that examples are needed?

He wasn't calling anyone crazy. The remark about "his crazy stories" was meant to be: "his stories on crazy (ie evil, corrupt) practices."

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#197

Post by hiccuphippo »

ardy42 wrote: post #180
barkingcat wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this it though, the engineers designing the ad targeting system at Facebook is linking the random emails you use as "catch all" to your main identity so you can be targeted specifically even though neither party has full knowledge of the linkage between your catchall email and your main identity email. This is facilitated by information that is not under your control. If facebook was able to design and build th…

> Isn't this it though, the engineers designing the ad targeting system at Facebook is linking the random emails you use as "catch all" to your main identity so you can be targeted specifically even though neither party has full knowledge of the linkage between your catchall email and your main identity email. If you use the method described in the grandparent, you use a unique email address for every site (e.g site1…

It is completely possible to fingerprint a browser and then group all the email accounts used on it and treat them as a single user. When was the last time you lent your device to someone so they could check their email?

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#198

Post by ddeck »

inetknght wrote: post #190
krageon wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need his crazy stories, really. All you need to do is accept that Facebook isn't behaving exceptionally poorly, this is industry standard. Lo and behold - the entire sector is suddenly a cesspool of disrespect and money grabbing at the cost of your data, your privacy, anything they will be able to get away with. And they can get away with a lot, because you are not allowed to talk when you work anywhere. On…

@da02 asked @spr1ted for some examples and you come in saying he's crazy and deny that examples are needed?

They didn't call the gp crazy. They labelled the stories crazy, which is precisely how the poster described them:

>things i have see flying by are crazy

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#199

Post by rchaud »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #171
ummonk wrote: post #17

As a security engineer, I cannot overstate just how horrible this is. Phone numbers might not be an ideal 2nd factor for authentication, but to punish users for setting up 2FA by using the provided phone number for ad targetting is incredibly unethical.

It's also something that people should have expected. I don't understand how people have not noticed that all of the major sites that generate revenue through user profiling and advertising have been pushing hard for users to either be obligated to register using their phone, or to setup a two factor authentication using their phone when it's not necessary for registration. The reason I say it's something people shou…

> Instead, because people do not seem inclined to naturally believe that corporations might have ulterior motives

People worship at the altar of success, and there aren't many relatively new companies as profitable as FB. That's not to say that these companies don't spend significant coin in pushing their inane message of "we're connecting the world" wherever they can. And mass media for the most part go along with it, mostly focusing on the stock price, rarely bothering to examine how FB makes its money and what tradeoffs that comes with.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#200

Post by ddeck »

asaph wrote: post #195
magicalhippo wrote: post #136

It's also entirely what I expected, hence why I haven't given Facebook my number. Not sure why anyone is surprised by this to be honest.

Facebook probably knows your phone number anyway because your friends have likely shared their phone's contacts with Facebook.

Or if you use Whatsapp. Their privacy policy makes this pretty clear:

As part of the Facebook family of companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, this family of companies. We may use the information we receive from them, and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings. This includes helping improve infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our Services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities. Facebook and the other companies in the Facebook family also may use information from us to improve your experiences within their services such as making product suggestions (for example, of friends or connections, or of interesting content) and showing relevant offers and ads.

Bizarrely, whilst general everywhere else, the policy specifically calls out banner ads to make it clear that they won't use them until they do, at which point they'll stop saying they don't:

No Third-Party Banner Ads. We do not allow third-party banner ads on WhatsApp. We have no intention to introduce them, but if we ever do, we will update this policy.

https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/#privacy-policy-affiliated-co...

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