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Off-Facebook activity

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Re: Off-Facebook activity

#291

Post by TACIXAT »

gpvos wrote: post #182
thegeekbin wrote: post #123

Clearly I need to step it up. I was (unsurprisingly) surprised at what I've observed they've managed to correlate. I run standard pi-hole, resist fingerprinting, and normally go through a VPN (mainly because I'm on public wifi half the time when travelling). I haven't logged into facebook in about four years, just did it for the first time today to see what's been correlated. Aside the mountain of irrelevant notifica…

Hmm, I don't use pi-hole, just uBlock Origin and Firefox containers, and they've only tracked three minor things, probably when I had some problems with my phone and uBlock wasn't working right. So how were they able to track so much about you? Do you have the Facebook or Whatsapp app on your phone? Or is this just the difference that they track much more in the US than in Europe?

My activity was largely from apps on my phone. I just uninstalled and reviewed every one of those that was unnecessary. Unfortunately I need to find a new financial aggregator, because mine was sharing data with FB. I've seen a few self hosted ones listed on hn.

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#292

Post by vinaypai »

eivarv wrote: post #103

I can't believe that this stuff is acceptible, or even legal. The fact that you're tracked off-Facebook (for instance), even if you're not logged in or on Facebook is not just creepy, but borderline abusive.

Congratulations, of all the people who have responded with outrage on this thread, you are the only person I've found that has a website listed that DOESN'T run Google Analytics or some other third party analytics platform.

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#294

Post by reaperducer »

sutterbomb wrote: post #270
reaperducer wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "savvy" customer has a card that doesn't make them perform a dog and pony show like you describe. A savvy customer's card charges the lowest reasonable rate in order to provide the service. Giving someone money and then feeling all giddy when you get a "reward" later means you've been gamed.

So you must have a recommendation for a card that charges lowest reasonable rate?

The rate a card charges differs from applicant to applicant. Without knowing your credit score, credit history, and other financial information I cannot recommend a card for you.

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#295

Post by novok »

thegeekbin wrote: post #123

Clearly I need to step it up. I was (unsurprisingly) surprised at what I've observed they've managed to correlate. I run standard pi-hole, resist fingerprinting, and normally go through a VPN (mainly because I'm on public wifi half the time when travelling). I haven't logged into facebook in about four years, just did it for the first time today to see what's been correlated. Aside the mountain of irrelevant notifica…

I think you can't avoid links you click within facebook itself right?

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#296

Post by neycoda »

I removed my Facebook info from my browser and phone, changed the info I had on there to be basically anonymized (except to people who know me), and then logged in with a different browser on both desktop and phone dedicated to just Facebook. Now they can't tell what websites I'm going to and don't have direct access to my photos and files etc.

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#297

Post by neycoda »

tclancy wrote: post #238
btrautsc wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. While its easy to point at Facebook and say "they are so creepy" - this sounds like the type of challenge every marketing department faces. "What is the attribution of X,Y,Z ad campaigns?" Connecting purchase + email + 'where the ad happened' via social solves that.

Absolutely, but I think it's time to start asking: 1. Is that ok that we accept this sort of Pavlovian training from anyone, much less for-profit companies? 2. Is it ok now that the entities are so easily able to completely track the effectiveness of their advertising and thus empowered to amplify whatever works to increase their success rather than some metric like human happiness?

Imagine all of our phones' lockscreens being unlockable only by face unlock and not fingerprint... you know, our face which is all over the internet and trackable across websites and in-store and public cameras.

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#298

Post by Jupe »

milankragujevic wrote: post #283
Jupe wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean you didn't know this would happen by adding something (script, tracker, pixel, etc.) to your site, or you don't have a root cause as to why your own site is sending data to FB?

I didn't assume that Facebook would explicitly connect this information with the visitors in this way. I don't remember WHY I added the pixel but I did add it. I need to get rid of these things, and Disqus. I was probably trying to do some research on visitor demographics, which presumably failed.

Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying. I'm working on a site rn, and hope to make it "ad-ethical" (if such a thing is possible any more).

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#299

Post by majormajor »

reaperducer wrote: post #294
sutterbomb wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you must have a recommendation for a card that charges lowest reasonable rate?

The rate a card charges differs from applicant to applicant. Without knowing your credit score, credit history, and other financial information I cannot recommend a card for you.

If you're just talking about interest rate, the trick is to not even have to care about that.

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#300

Post by oakesm9 »

netsharc wrote: post #88
oakesm9 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Monzo in my list too and downloaded the actual data. The only things listed are `ACTIVATE_APP` events. It doesn't seem to send any details to Facebook aside, from that you "activated" (opened) the app. Still not ideal, but not completely terrible.

When I used to have https://lua.xprivacy.eu/ it used to prompt me a lot, saying "This app is calling this API, do you want to allow or deny? (or allow/deny for 1 minute or 10 minutes). The Facebook app would query what packages/apps are installed on the Android phone. Yeah, Android devs, why is that an accessible API call? For one thing this is how FB could figure out how popular their competitors like WhatsApp, Inst…

It's part of the Intent system in Android. It's a really nice system where you can say "someone open the file with this URL and mime type" and the system asks the user which app they want to use to open it (or use their default if they set one.

It all works really well and lets app be loosely coupled to each other. It's also super flexible so you can use it for lots of different use cases. The API itself hasn't changed much since the first release of Android.

The issue is that you can query the Intent system to see if there is an app installed that can open your Intent. On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense. You could then display an error message to the user asking them to install and app that can handle it. The problem is that you can create an Intent that you know can only be handled by a single app (using the package name) and then you'll know if it's installed or not.

For what it's worth, iOS used to have exactly the same issue. You could query the phone could handle a specific "custom protocol scheme" (used for deep linking). You could then just query a scheme which you know is for a specific app and tell if the user had it installed. Apple fixed this by requireing you to include a predefined list of schemes which you can query for in your Info.plist (manifest file) and limiting the number you can have (30 I believe).

All APIs with good intentions, but very easy to abuse. Apple is just more comfortable breaking backward compatibility to fix these sorts of issues.

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