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Off-Facebook activity

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Re: Off-Facebook activity

#331
post #111
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are credit cards different from debit cards in this regard? Do some credit cards not sell your transactions?

It's the card network (MasterCard, Visa, AE) that sells your data. They each have their own op out: * https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do * https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/about-mastercard/what-we-do/... .

How does Capital One give back 2% on all purchases? They must be monetizing purchase data as well, right?

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#333
I had a few - all of them from my Android apps and via Facebook business tools i.e. the vendors are actively pushing my data to Facebook. One utility app that I'm not surprised about, one that I'm a bit more surprised about but the interesting bit was G-Shock Connect (for the watch).

I installed their app once, figured it doesn't properly do the only thing I needed it for (show battery charge level), and I went to uninstall it. How did it find itself on Facebook?

The app wasn't given any permissions and I did not enter any personal information. The TOS did require giving consent to sending app and watch usage data but I didn't tick allowing that for marketing purposes nor was personal information mentioned, just identification data from the phone itself, operating system etc.

The app must have obtained my phone number or email from the phone's personal data. Apparently that's possible even if I declined all explicit permissions. They might be able to find my Google email by using Android's AccountManager apis. Phone number might be possible but slightly tricky and I think I disconnected my phone number from Facebook way before installing their app.

Interesting stuff - looks like everything should run in an anonymous container by default on phones, too. I hope we'll get there soon. Still, a lot of this is based on trust rather than technical countermeasures. Will you trust the vendor or not?

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like the Google Analytics you have running on your website?

Yes that is something I plan to address by switching to another blogging platform. If you look at the GA ID you'll notice it's not mine and it belongs to my blogging platform (which apparently enables GA with their own ID even if you don't provide a custom one instead of just disabling the feature). Edit: I have now deleted the DNS records so the website will be down until I have time to fix this properly.

Do you have another platform (ideally self-hosted) in mind? I used to run a WordPress instance for my personal site but took it down after it got annoying to stay on top of the frequent updates and security fixes.

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#335
These apps are from my phone which does not have the facebook app installed. They must be harvesting stuff on me from the Instagram and/or Whatapp permissions.

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#336
post #326

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.

But this is such a weird way to think about it. Credit cards don't cost anything. In some vague grandiose sense prices are slightly higher since credit cards exists and merchants want to cover their fees but my perspective as a customer spending via a credit card is basically free money. There's no dog and pony show except buying things like I normally would. * I get literal cash through their rewards program which j…

The point is that everything you buy with the card is at least 2% more expensive, because the merchants are just passing on their credit card fees to the consumer. You are not saving money in any way, shape or form.

Once upon a time, it was beneficial for a merchant to accept credit cards, it lowered their costs for handling cash, which meant they saved money and the 2% cost for each transaction was reasonable.

In a world where everyone is using credit cards for every purchase, that 2% is essentially a tax instead.

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#337
post #266

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.

> feeling all giddy when you get a "reward" later means you've been gamed. It doesn't really feel that way as you're flying to Hawaii for free.

You're not flying to Hawaii for free. Every single purchase you made with the card was more expensive than it had to be, because the merchants needed to cover their credit card fees.

What you're doing is the equivalent of always paying with bills, and dropping your spare change in a jar. And when the jar is full, you buy a ticket to Hawaii with the money in it. Except with a credit card, they keep the jar, take half the quarters, give you back the rest, and make you feel grateful for the entire experience.

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#338
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which one was sharing the data?

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#339
Weirdly, FB thinks I've had dealings with Home Depot, which I've never visited (virtually or IRL). Nothing else, but then I use Ublock Origin, Privacy Badger, disconnect.me etc. as well as FB Purity. I also don't have a smartphone.

Re: Off-Facebook activity

#340
post #25

My off-facebook activity was empty. That's encouraging, because it looks like my countermeasures have been working: - Fingerprinting resistance in Firefox (privacy.resistFingerprinting = true) - First-party isolation in Firefox (privacy.firstparty.isolate = true) - Blocking third-party cookies in Firefox (network.cookie.cookieBehavior = 1) - Firefox container when I need to login to ad/tracking companies (Facebook, G…

How do you cope with constant reCAPTCHA prompts? I get prompted by Google when using search, because it thinks I'm a bot if I'm anonymous enough.

You learn to derive some satisfaction from feeding it inaccurate labels.
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