111–120 of 148 posts
I downloaded my FB data and as I predicted, nothing I'm bothered with. It is my common behavior that is ad targeted. Can someone please tell me what data people are so bothered with that Facebook uses to target basic ads? That "Facebook whistleblower" said the company is "profits over people". That people were appalled by that that will always be so funny to me.
Never had Instagram. Never had WhatsApp. Had an old Facebook account opened under a fake name, using a throwaway email (haven't opened it in six months, maybe more). That company is cancer.
Let me guess: you don't have a kid that goes to a school that only posts crucial news and updates to their Facebook page and you don't have a friend group that uses a WhatsApp group to plan events. Try explaining to the average human that you have a moral objection which means you can't install the same app everyone else has, and that everyone else needs to do a lot of work to accommodate you. One of my friend groups…
Link to the actual Consumer Reports report: https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/each-fac... So most of the data provided is probably coming in via the FB tracking pixel. I think the references to FB's "custom audiences" is a red herring - it's a very manual process and very few companies use that feature in any sort of scale. FB hashes the data that gets uploaded and specifically throws out extraneous…
I guess FB tracking pixels will no longer work when third-party cookies are removed from browsers. That seems like a massive hit for them if I understand it correctly (and a big W for us)
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>I couldn't stop thinking to myself about how many smart people work there, and how much money the company has, yet still it was one of the worst online experiences that I've had. Really feels like the product has been in 'maintenance mode' for a while. Probably the focus in the company has shifted to growing platforms and not declining ones. Once the grandparents are on the platform it dies. Was it a video you uploa…
> Once the grandparents are on the platform it dies. Really? I thought the point of Facebook was to be in touch with friends and relatives. I would rather say that "grandparents" were slow to adapt Facebook amd likewise slow to leave. The decline of Facebook seems to me to be related to the feed pushing crap people don't care about and competition from Instagram, TikTok amd whatever.
Instagram is interesting because it seems to have staying power in the face of Tiktok. Mainly just thirst traps and content stolen and ripped off of tiktok so not sure how long term it really is.
>The decline of Facebook seems to me to be related to the feed pushing crap people don't care about and competition from Instagram, TikTok amd whatever.
There is plenty of that on the other platforms you mentioned.
This is depressing, but of even more concern is the fact that this data (and other, perhaps more "important" data) is available to essentially anyone with enough money to pay for it. This obviously includes most governments. I'm fairly sure the data brokers are not too picky about how they get paid. There has to be regulation at the federal level to stop such practices. Nothing else will do.
Story is about Meta who doesn't sell your data.
Modern programmatic advertising enables each user to be pimped out to whichever manipulator is willing to pay the most. In just a few dozen milliseconds, Facebook will send out your personal data to participants in the advertising system ('bidstream data'), select a winner, and serve their ad to you.
Note: Your data goes out to bidders, and someone pays Facebook for it. That sure sounds like selling your data.
This is not some farcical, imaginary backdoor to collect data and spy on people. It's happening right now. "Patternz", an Israeli spy-tech company, run an advertising service as a front to get free access to bidstream data from 87 ad exchanges and SSPs including Google, Yahoo, MoPub, AdColony, and OpenX.
They take those bidstream data, de-anonymize them, and permanently record them. They claim to have profiles on billions of users including their location history, home address, interests, information about 'people nearby', 'co-workers' and 'family members'.
See also this slide of theirs: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F-5bA6QW8AAyfSK.jpg, entitled, "We help national security agencies detect audience patterns and user behavior using digital advertising data mining and analytics".
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Wait until you try Marketplace. For something with so much monetization potential, it still looks and feels like it was slapped together by an intern. Using it is an exercise in frustration.
Most of the Facebook site has felt like something "slapped together by an intern" for a long time for me. But yeah, FBM really went above and beyond in that regard the last time I tried using it. It's too bad, because it does have a lot of potential as you said; Craigslist has been mostly ruined by scammers and FB has the advantage that everyone is basically a verified user and not some random person in Nigeria who w…
When my wife sold a standing desk recently on FBM, approximately 60% of the respondents were scammers. They offered above the asking price, but wanted us to pay for a courier, for which they would repay us with cash in an envelope. The whole thing ended up so annoying and stressful, we said we'd never sell anything on Facebook again.
There's such a beautiful irony in reading about unfettered data mining on a website (theverge.com) which connects to *37* third-party domains when displaying the article: 1. ak.sail-horizon.com 2. amazon-adsystem.com 3. api.parsely.com 4. c.amazon-adsystem.com 5. cdn.concert.io 6. concert.io 7. coral.coralproject.net 8. coralproject.net 9. csp.withgoogle.com 10. d35xxde4fgg0cx.cloudfront.net 11. duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com…
I see 156 distinct 3rd parties on my side if I disable the content blocker so as to let the second-, third- and nth-waves of JavaScript execute: https://imgur.com/a/lZbUqnQ
Couple days ago I logged into Facebook for the first time in about 2-3 years because I wanted to download a video that I had saved there. What a hot mess. I needed to reset my password, but the form was seemingly unresponsive. Then suddenly a message appeared in a dialog popup letting me know that I had been temporarily locked out. I eventually managed to log in. Inside the app, I had a handful of messages from vario…
Wait until you try Marketplace. For something with so much monetization potential, it still looks and feels like it was slapped together by an intern. Using it is an exercise in frustration.
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Most browser "fingerprinting" methods have a pretty short half-life. The last assessment I read said something like half of the fingerprints were lost within 24 hours. There are some companies that advertise device fingerprinting for moderation/anti-abuse services, but I have yet to see it in any martech stack. I assume they give lots of false positives and don't distinguish between different users/devices on the sam…
>Most browser "fingerprinting" methods have a pretty short half-life. The last assessment I read said something like half of the fingerprints were lost within 24 hours. That's absolutely not my experience. Maybe if you use some weird research-level fingerprinting technique, but most fingerprints are just regular old boring stuff - screen and browser viewport size, installed plugins and fonts, browser UA and settings,…
https://medium.com/slido-dev-blog/we-collected-500-000-brows...
Can it track you for a bit and show you some ads? A little bit. But compared to a tracking pixel it is not even remotely as reliable.
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I've been on FF since before Safari. I've never been a Chrome user. FF is like a nice worn in pair of pants. It just fits.
Ha ha! I get it. But today’s FF is slipping to being worse. Lets see if uBO survives Manifest V3. And don't use DoH, I have a bad feeling about it, http cookies inside DoH are undefined thing.
