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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

#391
post #239

What's facebook's boiling point? My guess is they'll respond, they'll no longer use 2FA #'s for ads, the damage will have been done, and 99% of the population won't know any of it occurred. We'll repeat this cycle when a fresh revelation occurs months from now, as facebook continues to test how much they can leverage for more ad revenue. But none of it is actually slowing FB down. Its biggest dip in value came from d…

As someone who has occasionally runs experiments with FB adverts for various types of business. I feel it's boiling point will be when people and organisations advertising on the platform really start to look deeply into the value for money they are getting on it. I can't tell you the amount of times I've seen organisations throw money at it in return for dubious clicks from markets they never targeted, bot like user…

This is how I feel about ads in general.

The only type of ad that makes sense to me at all is one that educates someone about a class of problem and that there's at least one product (X) that can be used to solve this problem.

In many cases it would make more sense to focus these efforts on making stores more effective at presenting solutions and grouping related solutions in expected areas to improve the search effectiveness of independent agents that have black box algorithms and are outside of the store's control.

Attempting to modify said black boxes by an inundation of annoyances is ethnically wrong to me. (As implied above, when it ceases being educational it's increasingly likely to cross that line, particularly if the campaign is based on gimmicks or repetition to be effective in vulnerable population segments.)

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

#392

"Give me as much service as you can while keeping me as far off the grid as possible" is a skill that is sorely lacking in this market. I don't have this problem with weed dealers, but I have this problem with information dealers. Internet companies could seriously learn a thing or two from the black market on how you treat your customers.

That battle has already been lost; between a complete lack of at least semi-anonymous banking (I.E. GNU's Teller, well see notes), ad behamoths, "credit" companies (Experian, etc), and all sorts of proprietary social platforms having a majority of the market roped in: there's a shadow profile in one sense or another for everyone short of the crazy cabin in the wilderness types.

A focus on consumer rights, protections, and building difficult to defraud and difficult to exploit consumers systems is where effort needs to be spent.

* GNU Taler - A digital cash / micro-transaction system that hopes to be audit-able for tax and other legal reasons while still being anonymous for consumers.

Please read about privacy, verifiable in the right ways, and the "operational in 2018" claim

https://taler.net/en/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment#GNU_Taler

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

#393
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check the TOS and/or implementations for many of the tracking providers and you’ll see they use hashed emails. Show me a way to extract the common domain name from the below: 9425ca8eb02d022309ec175a7067b1567a5f741ec7010cc1b5034287f9db6e2f 4d1c86b9f418c713e784760fea809e34418c2f13e993d907783572ecc2c9bb6e

Its pretty simple to crack unsalted hashes using rainbow tables, unless each hash is salted with a random distinct salt and if that is the case then these hash seem pretty useless. So how do tracking providers use these hash ? What other info is sent along with the hash ?

> So how do tracking providers use these hash?

They use it to match traffic across devices and IP addresses.

> pretty simple to crack unsalted hashes

Go ahead and rainbow table those hashes then. If you do it and are the first one to email me (email address in profile), I’ll pay you $100.

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

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, because Move fast and break stuff is their mantra. I'm surprised that articles doesn't even mention it. Perhaps Move fast and hurt people would be more honest. I think it's rather catchy.

Move fast and break stuff, like a bull in a china shop.

Except they’re not allowed in Chinese shops

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

#395
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check the TOS and/or implementations for many of the tracking providers and you’ll see they use hashed emails. Show me a way to extract the common domain name from the below: 9425ca8eb02d022309ec175a7067b1567a5f741ec7010cc1b5034287f9db6e2f 4d1c86b9f418c713e784760fea809e34418c2f13e993d907783572ecc2c9bb6e

If the hashing algorithm is known (and my guess is it is at least possible to reverse engineer it, if it isn't documrnted) then cracking a hash with a GPU may be quite feasible.

The hashing algorithm is well known, it’s unsalted md5/sha1/sha256. That doesn’t make it necessarily possible (sure, some cases yes, but not even most), let alone feasible, to rainbow table them.

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

#396
post #180

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. If you use the method described in the grandparent, you use a unique email address for every site (e.g site1…

This is no longer "just a little bit of effort and minimal cost" - most likely no one will use unique emails for every site as well as use private browsing mode permanently in order to avoid cross cookie / cross site contamination via 3rd party (non facebook) tracking. Which is cited as a "feature" - allowing clients to bring their own ad tracking database and integrating that into the FB one in order to make ad targ…

> most likely no one will use unique emails for every site

I do and have done so for over 10 years. It’s been very eye opening to say the least to see how many sites have leaked my email.

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

#397
post #78

"Give me as much service as you can while keeping me as far off the grid as possible" is a skill that is sorely lacking in this market. I don't have this problem with weed dealers, but I have this problem with information dealers. Internet companies could seriously learn a thing or two from the black market on how you treat your customers.

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.

I mean, I've paid both Comcast and Verizon a lot of money for internet access, and they both have done awful, privacy-shattering things while I've paid them. (Subverting DNS, X-UIDH header, etc).

Once there's money on the table, companies are going to take it and assume the number of customers who walk away aren't enough to offset the profits.

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

#399
post #316
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think platforms like Facebook depend on being "cool" over some demographic. Then other demographics adopt it, time passes, other demographics grow tired of the same old Facebook look their parents also used, and Facebook starts to die. We've seen this as well with other social networks like hi5, myspace, that once dominated entire continents as the preferred social website. Of course they are smart and competent pe…

It is an anti-network effect. The early adaptors are cool, the late adaptors are not. In Facebook's case, the early adaptors are now old people posting photos of their children. The users aged to irrelevance. There definitely was a big difference between MySpace and the other social networks. Facebook ran well and worked. People forget the total shit show MySpace was in the middle of 2008. The site ran terribly, was…

They're both network effects. The difference is that the relative value per node, to other nodes has changed. Disaster hits when the high-value nodes leave.

Networks are driven by positive feedback both going up and down. This sounds good, but isn't: the system and balance points are inherently unstable. Nothing succeeds like success, or fails like failure.

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

#400
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much no one is actually sorry. They're just sorry the underestimated the negative response.

They are abjectly, truly remorseful and sorry that they got caught.

I thought that was Putin's motto.
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