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Sirubo: Packet filtering to block Google and Facebook tracking

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Re: Sirubo: Packet filtering to block Google and Facebook tracking

#71

Post by alpha_squared »

justapassenger wrote: post #63
alpha_squared wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just that most companies are using crap ad tech. Including Facebook, apparently. About 90% of Instagram ads were irrelevant to me for about two years. Then I mentioned an interest in photography in a private conversation, now 75% of ads are photography-related.

Let's apply occam's razor. What's more likely? 1. You mentioned thousands of other things in your private conversations. They suddenly start to narrow down on one specific one. 2. You're interested in photography, and are using service made to share photos. You follow photography accounts/search on the internet for photography related content, this signal got picked up, you clicked on some ad (by mistake most likely)…

To address your breakdown:

1. I distinctly hadn't mentioned photography in private or public messages. Ever. Nor had I tagged any of my camera equipment in any of my posts. Hard to believe, I know, but I created and manage the account with explicit intent and action, preferring to move personal conversations off-platform.

2. I don't follow photographers, and prefer to only follow certain friends. While I don't go to that great an extent of concealing my browsing history, I also make some effort to segregate information flow. Plus, the low-hanging fruit of Firefox + DuckDuckGo + uBlock usually does a decent job of helping with that.

3. In the two years I've had an account, I hadn't seen a single photography-related ad prior to the conversation on photography. Ads typically revolved around random tech products (many of which were irrelevant) and ads for TikTok (zero interest in it).

4. There was a dramatic shift in the content of ads within 24 hours of the conversation on photography. It's conservative to estimate 75% of ads are photo-related. I have a hard time remembering any other ad (a sign of their irrelevancy, in my opinion).

5. Given the demographics of this site, I'd appreciate (for myself and others) if you'd give at least a little bit of benefit of doubt on technical comprehension.

Re: Sirubo: Packet filtering to block Google and Facebook tracking

#72

Post by not2b »

fouric wrote: post #66
_jal wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone wants to convince me FB, et al are doing this, they can show me packet traces of audio being uploaded for analysis, or in the alternative (if the theory is on-phone analysis) resource consumption data from the phone doing it. There's been so much discussion of this theory that we'd have seen one of those by now. I have zero love for the surveillance shops, but there's just no real evidence this happens.

Resource consumption for low-accuracy voice transcription is trivial - think in the single-digit milliwatt range[1] for custom hardware. It would also be really easy to hide the resulting small amount of textual data in routine communications with the service's server. You can't rule out audio transcription on the technical basis that "it's too hard" alone, because it's not too hard. (for Google, that is - Facebook i…

Better to focus on the things that we have evidence that they are doing (and there is plenty of abusive behavior we know about) than to speculate about unlikely attack angles and say "we can't rule it out" (proving a negative is nearly impossible). Working that way just leads to focus on the wrong threats.

Re: Sirubo: Packet filtering to block Google and Facebook tracking

#73

Post by kindle-dev »

justapassenger wrote: post #63
alpha_squared wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just that most companies are using crap ad tech. Including Facebook, apparently. About 90% of Instagram ads were irrelevant to me for about two years. Then I mentioned an interest in photography in a private conversation, now 75% of ads are photography-related.

Let's apply occam's razor. What's more likely? 1. You mentioned thousands of other things in your private conversations. They suddenly start to narrow down on one specific one. 2. You're interested in photography, and are using service made to share photos. You follow photography accounts/search on the internet for photography related content, this signal got picked up, you clicked on some ad (by mistake most likely)…

What’s more likely? A service that vacuums up every piece of data vacuuming up microphone data, or the same service intentionally excluding this one random piece of data? Every time this comes up, people jump up and say “they’re definitely not listening!” But why do people think that? Facebook gathers as much data as possible, including buying a VPN to inspect supposedly private traffic. Why wouldn’t they listen to a microphone? As an anecdote, I know someone who worked on smart TVs. Part of what they implemented was a system to turn on the tv’s microphone to get an audio fingerprint of the content being watched.

Re: Sirubo: Packet filtering to block Google and Facebook tracking

#74

Post by mitchitized »

alpha_squared wrote: post #48
jklinger410 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who works in ads, this is a spot-on summation of the current state of tracking. And that's without getting into how machine learning can use seemingly unrelated data points to learn more about you than you could imagine. At this point if you have even the most basic connections (US bank account, home owner, gps, insurance, a car) the more sophisticated tracking methods can still learn about you and reach y…

> It's just that most companies are using crap ad tech. Including Facebook, apparently. About 90% of Instagram ads were irrelevant to me for about two years. Then I mentioned an interest in photography in a private conversation, now 75% of ads are photography-related.

I once let my then 13yo borrow my laptop to do some research as he wanted to start experimenting with modded minecraft. I sat next to him while he researched minecraft plugins - no opportunity for him to hit some cough other websites, it was totally legit browsing session. Let's just say the advertising bubbles that Google rammed me into literally forced me to install adblockers just to make my web browsing experiences SFW again (also saw a huge spike in hostile ads with malware, and suspect it was too drastic and immediate a change to be mere coincidence).

Saying "crap ad tech" is giving way, way too much credit to ad tech. I'd argue current ad tech IS crap, because the overall methodology and approach is fundamentally crap.

Re: Sirubo: Packet filtering to block Google and Facebook tracking

#75

Post by Y_Y »

_jal wrote: post #60
deeblering4 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What reassurances have you had about not being listened to? I keep cam/mic access switched off a lot for this reason, and I've only seen generic denials/refusals that it is or could happen but nothing concrete, much like the pre-snowden outlook towards internet surveillance.

If someone wants to convince me FB, et al are doing this, they can show me packet traces of audio being uploaded for analysis, or in the alternative (if the theory is on-phone analysis) resource consumption data from the phone doing it. There's been so much discussion of this theory that we'd have seen one of those by now. I have zero love for the surveillance shops, but there's just no real evidence this happens.

I'd be satisfied with a "beyond a reasonable doubt"-type argument. Somebody pre-registers some hypotheses, like "I've never thought about beanie babies in my life, but I'm going to talk about them in front of my phone. I expect I'll start seeing ads for them at a noticably higher rate then before.". Such an experiment wouldn't be difficult to conduct, but I've never heard of it being done methodically, only noticed after the fact.

I'd be very pleased to see it done though. Complications will certainly arise, so N should be large, and there should be several independent replications.

Maybe it's overly cynical, but this also makes me think of the Volkswagen emissions kerfuffle. Would it be so surprising if the ad software was sophisticated enough to know when it was being tested, and try to play dumb?

Re: Sirubo: Packet filtering to block Google and Facebook tracking

#76

Post by tinus_hn »

marketingtech wrote: post #7

This is cool, but not super useful in 2021. Google and Facebook have already moved their tracking technologies beyond frontend network calls due to a rise in browser-level blocking (browser security policies, international regulations, AdBlock, PiHole, etc). The next generation of tracking tech relies on the backend transfer of data between a website and the ad platform, which is invisible to your own network. It als…

That’s great because that means there can be no more cross-domain tracking. Which is what was the problem all along.

Re: Sirubo: Packet filtering to block Google and Facebook tracking

#77

Post by Nextgrid »

jahewson wrote: post #67
DrBazza wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since I've been "reassured" that we're not being listened to by smart speakers, I can only assume that familial links i.e. the 'facebook graph', are also exploited by ad companies now as well. Anec-data: visiting the in-laws in a different part of the country, so my device and location is 'known' to have geographically moved by tracking, they searched for garages and glazing. We return home, and every advert is for g…

That’s most likely because your device used their wifi and ended up behind their nat using the same ip as them. The anonymous tracking cookie ids on your device get associated with searches from that ip. (i.e. “cookie 1234 is in-market for glazing”) and you take those cookies back home with you. This is actually a massive failure because you’re not likely to purchase glazing at all.

I'm not sure it's a failure. You could argue that showing him ads for glazing could be beneficial in case he spots a good deal and decides to talk to them about it.

Now I don't think the ad network is that smart and explicitly intended for this, but presumably in aggregate they're seeing better results by merging targeting buckets by IP than not, so they continue doing it.

Re: Sirubo: Packet filtering to block Google and Facebook tracking

#78

Post by drdebug »

alpha_squared wrote: post #71
justapassenger wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's apply occam's razor. What's more likely? 1. You mentioned thousands of other things in your private conversations. They suddenly start to narrow down on one specific one. 2. You're interested in photography, and are using service made to share photos. You follow photography accounts/search on the internet for photography related content, this signal got picked up, you clicked on some ad (by mistake most likely)…

To address your breakdown: 1. I distinctly hadn't mentioned photography in private or public messages. Ever. Nor had I tagged any of my camera equipment in any of my posts. Hard to believe, I know, but I created and manage the account with explicit intent and action, preferring to move personal conversations off-platform. 2. I don't follow photographers, and prefer to only follow certain friends. While I don't go to…

If you are interested, you should know that it's possible to not be seeing any ads at all on a computer (phones are a different beast). It's a bit of a chore but it takes 3 things: firefox with ublock origin + noscript + delete cookies and history on exit. I haven't seen ads in years. You can go a step further and create startup profiles. It's a bit chore because you have to selectively allow domains for content to display (reader mode can help), but that's the price to pay to minimize tracking and remove annoying ads.

Re: Sirubo: Packet filtering to block Google and Facebook tracking

#79

Post by KingMachiavelli »

mitchitized wrote: post #74
alpha_squared wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just that most companies are using crap ad tech. Including Facebook, apparently. About 90% of Instagram ads were irrelevant to me for about two years. Then I mentioned an interest in photography in a private conversation, now 75% of ads are photography-related.

I once let my then 13yo borrow my laptop to do some research as he wanted to start experimenting with modded minecraft. I sat next to him while he researched minecraft plugins - no opportunity for him to hit some cough other websites, it was totally legit browsing session. Let's just say the advertising bubbles that Google rammed me into literally forced me to install adblockers just to make my web browsing experienc…

Might not be that strange. The Minecraft plugins community is the perfect group to trick into installing malware. There are shaders and extensions that are hosted on very shady website and people just act like it is no big deal.

Re: Sirubo: Packet filtering to block Google and Facebook tracking

#80

Post by chmsky00 »

JohnFen wrote: post #57
marketingtech wrote: post #7

This is cool, but not super useful in 2021. Google and Facebook have already moved their tracking technologies beyond frontend network calls due to a rise in browser-level blocking (browser security policies, international regulations, AdBlock, PiHole, etc). The next generation of tracking tech relies on the backend transfer of data between a website and the ad platform, which is invisible to your own network. It als…

Yes, this has been a terrible escalation of the battle. It means that, in addition to my other defensive tactics, I also need to be sure not to create accounts, even -- or especially -- free ones.

Surely Ycombinator (or others) would never run analysis on comments on HN to spot emerging trends.

Is moderating for users or to keep their inference engine simple?

I mean the backers of Facebook? The schemers who took back control of Reddit?

Surely the most principled of people.

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