Logging out of Facbook is not enough • Hacker News Board

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#51

Post by mark_l_watson » Sun, Sep 25, 2011, 2:55 PM UTC

A question: I periodically delete all cookies in Chrome, and only use Safari for visiting Facebook; this should be safe enough, right? I use one browser (Chrome) for work related things like GMail, Twitter, web search, HN, and customer sites. I use Safari for casual browsing (Facebook, Reddit, etc.) This way I sandbox web tracking to one browser.

I suppose that one big hole in this is tracking my IP address.

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#52

Post by Megatron007 » Sun, Sep 25, 2011, 2:56 PM UTC

Funny how hacker news is taken over "OMG! FB is evil!" stories and no one mentions Google, who is 1000x worse privacy wise. Too bad HN has been taken over Google employees trying to make FB look bad while their are doing business as usual.

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#53

Post by dchest » Sun, Sep 25, 2011, 2:57 PM UTC

Megatron007 wrote: post #52

Funny how hacker news is taken over "OMG! FB is evil!" stories and no one mentions Google, who is 1000x worse privacy wise. Too bad HN has been taken over Google employees trying to make FB look bad while their are doing business as usual.

Have you read the thread about Chrome privacy? There are plenty of complaints in the comments there.

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#54

Post by tobiasu » Sun, Sep 25, 2011, 2:58 PM UTC

Megatron007 wrote: post #52

Funny how hacker news is taken over "OMG! FB is evil!" stories and no one mentions Google, who is 1000x worse privacy wise. Too bad HN has been taken over Google employees trying to make FB look bad while their are doing business as usual.

Nice try, Mark.

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#55

Post by jmspring » Sun, Sep 25, 2011, 3:07 PM UTC

The solutions based solely around cookies only will help with that particular mechanism. Over the last year, I've seen a couple of articles similar to the following:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714446

and

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2891369

Where "cookies" can be stored in more than just the traditional cookie.db. I haven't looked to see if FB is making use of these alternative mechanisms, but other sites have.

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#56

Post by jrockway » Sun, Sep 25, 2011, 3:11 PM UTC

16s wrote: post #43

I blackhole facebook.com at the domain level using pdnsd: neg { name=facebook.com; types=domain; } I have no idea why people are so eager to give away their privacy to Facebook and others to sell and whore-out to the highest bidder. It's akin to getting a handful of bright, pretty beads for your property.

What sort of sales and whoring-out has Facebook done? Is there really any value in one's social graph, or do we just hope there is so we can hate Facebook for being evil instead of for making us realize how dumb our friends are?

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#57

Post by hamidpalo » Sun, Sep 25, 2011, 3:14 PM UTC

To be completely honest, I don't really see why something like this is so novel and outrageous. It is as if everyone has forgotten why and how companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, etc.. are able to provide what they do for free. The implicit contract is "you get all this for free, and in return we get to serve you ads that we target to you." Moreover, they all have much more information on you than your browsing habits.

Why the outrage?

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#58

Post by rythie » Sun, Sep 25, 2011, 3:20 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #51

A question: I periodically delete all cookies in Chrome, and only use Safari for visiting Facebook; this should be safe enough, right? I use one browser (Chrome) for work related things like GMail, Twitter, web search, HN, and customer sites. I use Safari for casual browsing (Facebook, Reddit, etc.) This way I sandbox web tracking to one browser. I suppose that one big hole in this is tracking my IP address.

Firefox can delete all cookies everytime you close it, helps stop any site from tracking you for more than a day/session.

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#59

Post by lurker19 » Sun, Sep 25, 2011, 3:35 PM UTC

This is like the old meme "If you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook."

There's no solution to "I like using Facebook but I don't like Facebook using me."

If you don't want Facebook to talk to your computer, don't let your computer talk to Facebook.

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#60

Post by 0x12 » Sun, Sep 25, 2011, 4:06 PM UTC

lurker19 wrote: post #59

This is like the old meme "If you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook." There's no solution to "I like using Facebook but I don't like Facebook using me." If you don't want Facebook to talk to your computer, don't let your computer talk to Facebook.

But it's not that simple now, is it? Facebook infests your life whether you want it or not and does not have a 'no thanks' or 'yes please' option that will kill all their cruft on a thousand and one websites. On a typical day of surfing you probably load their widgets 100's if not 1000's of times through all the sites that place the cruft on their pages. Whether or not you hit a page with a facebook widget on it is unknowable before you hit the page and facebook does not have a list of domains/hosts to blacklist either. And blacklisting is already beyond the capabilities of most internet users (which is really a sad thing, but you can bet that only a very tiny portion of the netizens knows where to find their 'hosts' file and how to make it do stuff for them).