Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

user-images.githubusercontent.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 232 posts

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#211

Post by mabbo »

medion wrote: post #157
mabbo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hard topic. My team mostly does experiments, A/B tests on new merchants to see what nudges leads to better results overall. The reality is we have a lot of ideas and we're trying to get data to figure out those answers. But we don't truly know yet. The hard part (as far as I can tell) is product market fit and finding your customer base. Once that's established, you have some momentum, leading to repeat custom…

Thanks - do you have any brief tips on the best apps for ad delivery or retargeting in Shopify? Any thoughts on the most cost effective ad networks for small shops (FB, Google, Pinterest, other?).

Honestly I only joined a few months ago so all of this is new to me too! The one consistent thing I've heard is that reddit is full of good advice.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#212

Post by Nextgrid »

dillondoyle wrote: post #187
dvt wrote: post #13

As someone that has spent a sizable amount of my career in ad products, the outrage here is kind of (sadly) funny. A conversion pixel? Hah, if you only had an idea of what the Facebook data faucet looked like in 2007-2017, your hairs would stand. Pretty sure they were breaking all kinds of PII laws.

I used to tell people if they know how ad tech worked it would be banned tomorrow. I doubt it's on FB during that period though? I would guess though that a bunch of health tech sent (perhaps accidentally just not understanding) a bunch of patient data though. Seems they are the responsible party. There's been other examples beyond FB of 'auto track' too. devs just don't know or forget to turn it off. Not to mention…

> I would guess though that a bunch of health tech sent

I worked for a "healthtech" company in London at the beginning of the pandemic. They had the Facebook SDK malware embedded in the app that people were supposed to use for GP consultations.

I don't believe any explicit health data was sent (there was no intent to do so, and I’m not sure if that would even be possible), but merely the fact that I'm talking to a doctor (and the current time, location, device fingerprint, etc) is not something I'd like Facebook to know.

I know breaching the GDPR is basically the norm in any tech company but I thought that being involved in healthcare would make them super risk-averse and make an extra effort to comply.

They were not alone in this - PatientAccess and a bunch of other sites - that you can use to book GP consultations (including through the NHS - UK’s socialised healthcare system) had a shit ton of such trackers too, obviously loaded before any GDPR consent could even be obtained.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#213

Post by Nextgrid »

dillondoyle wrote: post #200
Gunax wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I am ready for my hairs to stand up. What did the data faucet contain?

Any developer can still send almost any data they want into FB to track basically anything. 'offline conversion' still allows you to send in names, age, bday, gender, etc for matching, IP, UA. Though now it's hashed before going to FB. And you can pass almost whatever custom data you want in. So I can in my industry optimize for a long term political donor, or potentially an early vote. Or someone accidentally sends…

> Though now it's hashed before going to FB.

It is however an easily-reversible hash, by design as that's how FB can correlate between the different datasets. When it comes to finite sets such as phone numbers or dates of birth it's also trivial to search the entire space by bruteforce.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#214

Post by Nextgrid »

ornornor wrote: post #192
Moru wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just install uBlock on your friends and families browsers. Most people seems fine with being tracked if that means they get "offers" they don't want to miss. I however detest anything connected to advertisement to the level that I frequently hang up when our own sales people call me because I directly spot a salesperson, even before I recognize the voice... Quite embarrasing sometimes :-) So I install uBlock, uMatrix…

To add: the iPhone has no adblocker BUT nextdns gets rid of all ads on my non jailbroken iPhones. Except YouTube. So I don’t use the YT app.

iPhone has AdGuard which is decent. There's also Lockdown Privacy which acts as a local VPN server (that the device itself connects to) which can filter in-app spyware such as the Facebook SDK.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#215

Post by Nextgrid »

Nursie wrote: post #184
hw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, no more annoying popups asking me if i want to accept cookies or be tracked. I am in the ‘do not care’ camp and i just want to be able to visit sites without having to click accept every time. These consent banners are a false sense of privacy. People who “dont know” are most likely just going to give consent anyway. It’s the same thing as TOS consent.

> These consent banners are a false sense of privacy. They are also a set of dark patterns. They annoy you so you just click OK, they make it sound like if you want to opt out you're the unreasonable one, and they hide the options as best they can. Sometimes they hide them entirely. If they weren't intent on tracking and reselling that data, they wouldn't need to ask. They don't need to have these dialogues, that is…

> They are also a set of dark patterns.

Which aren't compliant with the GDPR, the regulation they're pretending to comply with. The problem is enforcement has been severely lacking and the regulators are useless at handling complaints even when you do waste hours submitting one.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#216

Post by ornornor »

Nextgrid wrote: post #214
ornornor wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add: the iPhone has no adblocker BUT nextdns gets rid of all ads on my non jailbroken iPhones. Except YouTube. So I don’t use the YT app.

iPhone has AdGuard which is decent. There's also Lockdown Privacy which acts as a local VPN server (that the device itself connects to) which can filter in-app spyware such as the Facebook SDK.

Can they block YT ads? It’s the only place I’m getting ads on my phone.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#217

Post by Nextgrid »

ornornor wrote: post #216
Nextgrid wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhone has AdGuard which is decent. There's also Lockdown Privacy which acts as a local VPN server (that the device itself connects to) which can filter in-app spyware such as the Facebook SDK.

Can they block YT ads? It’s the only place I’m getting ads on my phone.

Not sure - I recommend just using Invidious for this. Host your own private instance on a small computer at home. Put it on a random domain/port and it's unlikely to be discovered so you don't even need auth.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#218

Post by boring_twenties »

Nextgrid wrote: post #76
boring_twenties wrote: post #15

I don't get this. Nothing about tiktok in the Network debugger, nor in uBlock or NoScript for that matter.

I bet it's loaded by Google Tag Manager which acts as a "dropper" to load further malware. If you block that (which I assume you do if you have uBlock Origin) you don't get to see the rest.

Ah yes I certainly do block that.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#219

Post by tentacleuno »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #191
tentacleuno wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of client-side JavaScript code that inconspicuous Like button loads is unnerving.

Doesn't matter much. Now it'll just happen server side where the server sends the same types of data directly to facebook. See the facebook CAPI. Basically a server side implementation of DataLayer and such...

I'm not particularly surprised. I always knew this day would come. In fact, I've been wondering why they haven't done this for a while. Maybe it's time to invest in a good VPN / Tor.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#220

Post by kshdeo »

rhizome wrote: post #138
kshdeo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they know how their campaigns are doing -> they can target better and earn more money and in turn give you more discounts. So it’s just good karma to let them run the tiny js script which does no more harm than 100 other services running on your machine, which you never used either.

Aside from how well targeting works (it doesn't), it's a bit presumptuous to assume resources on a user's machine are free for the taking, much less justifying it with an assumption about "unused" services running on that machine. At the same time, and I imagine this might be the vantage point you're speaking from, it wouldn't be the first time advertisers played fast and loose with user resources and activity.

I would rephrase what I said - this is one of the ways how tech companies make it affordable for us to order ‘food’ from the comfort of our home while someone is running on a bike in a snow storm to get our favorite pizza before it gets cold.

On the other hand, you always have a choice to not use UberEats(or most others) and order by phone/walk-in and save your resources.

And it would be a bit of exaggeration to say targeting doesn’t work - It’s obviously far from perfect but it generates billions everyday for a reason.

Post reply on HN