Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by ryanwaggoner » Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 1:04 AM UTC

Jaruzel wrote: post #446

mtgx wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is already in decline (people have stopped using it, either completely or drastically reduced their usage of it). The problem is Facebook is allowed to buy rising competitors on its way down, thus prolonging its monopoly in the social media space.

It may be in decline, but like a ship slowing down from light speed, it will take years before there's any significant change in the social media landscape. They have a very long time-frame of opportunity to turn their ship around, and it wouldn't surprise me if they do. A good real world example is Disney. Disney has been almost broke a few times over its lifetime, yet currently it's so huge that people believe it w…

It used to be that we'd predict it would be IBM, or Microsoft who would be 'The Company', more recently we'd say it would be Google. Currently however, it's more likely to be Facebook.

This is exactly why we shouldn’t worry about it. The company that we think is going to rule the world forever changes every ten years.

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

#472

Post by realreality » Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 1:13 AM UTC

sctb wrote: post #470

realreality wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think creatively! For instance, make sure that backups silently corrupt data. Someone could also lace the salad in the salad bar with arsenic.

You've gone off into uncivil territory—please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I was offering creative suggestions. What I said wasn’t anything I’d avoid saying in person, nor did I have any ill will toward the commenter I replied to.

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

#473

Post by everdev » Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 4:06 AM UTC

epicide wrote: post #248

everdev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why have costly government regulation when users can just quit? Plenty of other online and offline ways to connect with the people in your life.

Why have costly government regulation when people can just not breathe polluted air? There are some things users/people did not sign up for and cannot (reasonably) opt out of that still harm them. This is what regulations are for.

Air is a necessity, Facebook is not. I don't use Facebook and personally don't want my tax dollars spent overseeing a non-essential service. I'd rather send our tax dollars towards environmental pollution and areas that actually affect us all much more seriously.

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

#474

Post by everdev » Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 4:13 AM UTC

lumberjack wrote: post #22

everdev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why have costly government regulation when users can just quit? Plenty of other online and offline ways to connect with the people in your life.

Users cannot "just quit". Facebook probably has a profile for my grandma who never touched a PC in her whole life.

Many people can't quit because they are addicted, but there is an option to permanently delete your account and it takes about 5min. I'm not aware of Facebook creating profiles for people that haven't signed up for their service. If so, that should definitely be illegal.

The government should have bigger fish to fry than trying to regulate the distribution of information that you have and continue to willingly provide to a company. If you don't like it, sure government could jump in and make Facebook just how you like it, or you could delete the info you don't want them to have. The later sounds easier on everyone.

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

#475

Post by makecheck » Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 9:28 PM UTC

This is the kind of thing that is stupidly hard to fight now. Even if you block Facebook’s 80,000 domains at your router, your friend’s address book dump gives lots of goodies to Facebook and 3rd parties and you can’t touch it. Every new thing they try becomes illegal in 2 years “but not yet” so they do it until they can’t.

Sometimes it seems like the “Default deny” security concept needs to apply to Internet companies. Instead of having years to screw with data and the Internet until told “no”, how about every idea they have is illegal until it can be proven through thorough review that it might be valuable?

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

#476

Post by jarfil » Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 11:57 PM UTC

underwater wrote: post #37

jarfil wrote: post #6

Phone numbers were not a secure 2FA anyway, and I've been using the TOTP alternative since it's been available... but I don't really see a problem with them using whatever to show "more relevant ads", if you don't want ads just use an ad blocker.

Likewise, passwords fail to protect against a whole class of attacks. I don’t know why Facebook still uses them.

Phone numbers fail against remote third party undetectable attacks with O(1) complexity. You'd have to use a password like "1234" to fail like that.

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

#477

Post by Breza » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

asaph wrote: post #193

kozikow wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. This isn't done just for ad targeting, either. If a user invokes a GDPR right to be forgotten, it's useful to make sure you've found all the instances of that user's email address in your system regardless of the +additions.

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

#478

Post by epicide » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 2:59 PM UTC

everdev wrote: post #473

epicide wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why have costly government regulation when people can just not breathe polluted air? There are some things users/people did not sign up for and cannot (reasonably) opt out of that still harm them. This is what regulations are for.

Air is a necessity, Facebook is not. I don't use Facebook and personally don't want my tax dollars spent overseeing a non-essential service. I'd rather send our tax dollars towards environmental pollution and areas that actually affect us all much more seriously.

The point wasn't that Facebook is a necessity. It's that Facebook is unavoidable.

Unfortunately, whether you created a profile or not, you can't just "not use Facebook" with their whole shadow profiles.

Sure, they aren't (currently) pumping waste into the environment. I'm not saying those things aren't important, but I do think we're going to look back 10 years from now and wonder how we let Facebook even get this bad.