381–390 of 395 posts
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…
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I think GP is saying that Google itself is presenting the captchas, not the Google results they click. I've had it happen a couple of times when using VPNs before.
reCAPTCHA is a Google product, but the owner site needs to actually integrate it, so it's a conscientious decision
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reCAPTCHA is a Google product, but the owner site needs to actually integrate it, so it's a conscientious decision
I might not have been clear; sometimes when using a VPN, you can't even load Google search results until you submit a captcha. If you go to "google.com", it will make you enter a captcha before you can search anything.
Having done this in a previous life, they do this because they fight against scrapping their search results.
I realize this is an unpopular opinion around here... but can anyone explain how they have actually been harmed by this? Like for real not in abstract notions of "creepiness" or whatever. I, for one with Facebook actually figured how to do something useful with that data and not be that raw sewage stream that basically led to stop logging in.
The harm is that Facebook gains control over prediction markets that they then sell to the rich and powerful to nudge enough of the population to their points of view. These points of view are often not in the general public interest.
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Yes I went through that too. It was about 2 years ago. They sent me all the warnings that they were deleting anything. Do I believe them at all? Not really?
I know people who have left Facebook and then much later come back, setting up a new account with new credentials and Facebook could still begin to suggest old friends and interests.
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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…
Which is all fine and good but my options are pay 2+% more for everything and get nothing or pay 2+% more and get something. Like there’s no point to trying to punch a river as a lowly software dev completely unrelated to finance and politics.
But, you have to realize that it's not beneficial to you. You don't earn anything, you merely, barely, move the needle back up to break-even. You're not gaining. You're not winning. You're not sticking anything to any man. If the entire credit card industry got rid of rewards, and lowered their merchant fees, it would be a net benefit to you.
So feeling happy or grateful for cash-back means that they got you, they tricked you into feeling grateful for the privilege of giving away your money.
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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…
If you paid cash, in virtually every case you'd pay exactly the same price because most merchants don't provide cash discounts. If your merchant does provide a cash discount, I would suggest taking advantage of it. But if they don't provide a cash discount, you're still paying that 2% margin anyway without receiving any benefit from it. Likewise, except for small businesses whose owners don't actually price in the co…
The actual cost of handling card payments is very, very low these days, but merchants are stuck paying the higher price, because there's effectively no competition in the space. To avoid having obscene profits, the cc companies give back a lot of the extra money to the consumers in the form of cashbacks and rewards, and then consumers stupidly feel grateful for being fleeced.
In an ideal world, merchants would pay only the actual cost for handling card payments, only pay for the tech itself, and the fraud risk. Naturally, such a pricing would be a fixed per-transaction-fee, because the actual cost is the same for each transaction.
In the same ideal world, the credit risk of credit cards have to be managed through the interest rate and credit worthiness management. It's completely outrageous that credit card processing fees should in any way, shape or form cover the risk side or the fraud side of the business. That's not the merchant's problem.
That would be fair. That wouldn't be gameable. Some countries did exactly this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dankort
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If you paid cash, in virtually every case you'd pay exactly the same price because most merchants don't provide cash discounts. If your merchant does provide a cash discount, I would suggest taking advantage of it. But if they don't provide a cash discount, you're still paying that 2% margin anyway without receiving any benefit from it. Likewise, except for small businesses whose owners don't actually price in the co…
The cost for a merchant to handle credit cards is whatever the credit card companies can get away with. The actual cost of handling card payments is very, very low these days, but merchants are stuck paying the higher price, because there's effectively no competition in the space. To avoid having obscene profits, the cc companies give back a lot of the extra money to the consumers in the form of cashbacks and rewards…
In other words, the cost of processing credit cards is low enough that it successfully competes with every alternative form of payment. In which case I don't see what you're outraged about. Invent a more cost-effective payment mechanism if you think there's an opportunity for it.
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Specifically, how do you do it on a normal Android device? Is it even possible to do this on an iOS device that's on 4G or someone else's wifi? Do iOS devices have the same "leak"?
> Is it even possible to do this on an iOS device that's on 4G No. > Is it even possible to do this on an iOS device that's on [...] someone else's wifi Yes, since you can do it on your device, and do not have to do it on the router. Drawback is you have to do it for each Wifi network anew. > Do iOS devices have the same "leak" Yes, there is nothing that prevents apps from phoning home (or phoning every one of a doze…
> No.
If it is a DNS server change on 4G/LTE, it can be done by using FOSS apps like DNSCloak on iOS. [1]
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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.
There're open source track free comments:
https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments
All of them are equally ads and tracking free, and have optional paid hosting services (if you don't want to self host). I'm developing the last one, Talkyard.