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Logging out of Facbook is not enough

nikcub.appspot.com

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Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#61

Post by rhizome »

jrockway wrote: post #56
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?

Is there really any value in one's social graph

If there is value in the graph, then the protection works. If there isn't value, then this is a fail-safe.

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#62

Post by chaostheory »

jrockway wrote: post #56
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?

The more data we have about a user's behavior the more useful it is potentially for predicting future behavior; whether it's how likely they are to buy brand x from store y or who they will vote for in the next election, and how they influence their friends and family (or vice versa).

Right now machine learning is still a niche area for the majority of programmers. Looking at open source software landscape for ml, this is slowly changing. It's only a matter of time before people make breakthrough applications (that is if they haven't already).

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#63

Post by jrockway »

chaostheory wrote: post #62
jrockway wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The more data we have about a user's behavior the more useful it is potentially for predicting future behavior; whether it's how likely they are to buy brand x from store y or who they will vote for in the next election, and how they influence their friends and family (or vice versa). Right now machine learning is still a niche area for the majority of programmers. Looking at open source software landscape for ml, th…

I don't get why it's a big deal if Facebook knows who you're going to vote for or what brands you might buy.

I suppose that because people buy or vote for what they're told to buy or vote for, this will let those wanting to influence people more effectively spend their money. But the solution to that is not AdBlock, it's education. Smarter people mean less susceptibility to manipulation, which is what we are really trying to achieve, right?

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#64

Post by NHQ »

thrill wrote: post #40
v21 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, indeed, using your combination of locale, useragent, etc. These are often unique. You can test yours here: http://panopticlick.eff.org/

It is indeed sort of disturbing that panopticlick gives me the message "Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 1,769,884 tested so far."

If you add any new plugins your print would be unique again compared to your previous settings, which would make you difficult to track. Stay unique, my friends.

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#65

Post by bunnyhero »

Zakuzaa wrote: post #30
veyron wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expand on this more. How does this differ from privacy mode (at this point most browsers have a "InPrivate" browsing or "Incognito" or "Private" mode

But you can't really use incognito mode all the time. It will log you out of all other 'legitimate' sites you want to be logged in forever, like Gmail.

also, currently, all incognito windows (in chrome) share the same cookie jar. so if you are using facebook in an incognito window while surfing other sites in other incognito windows, you have the same problem.

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#66

Post by fl3tch »

buro9 wrote: post #20
jbk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that, but with EasyPrivacy, I still have the facebook comments on TC, but not with that rule. Maybe I did something wrong...

EasyPrivacy rules can be seen here: https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.txt Search that for 'face' and you'll find only 4 rules that would apply, and those are about removing pixel trackers whilst leaving content intact. The rules above remove content, which is just as well as anything a pixel tracker can do content could do. Which is where the current paranoia level seems to be.

There's also the Antisocial filter, which removes social widgets.

https://adversity.googlecode.com/hg/Antisocial.txt

It has many filters for Facebook, and I can clearly see, for example, the one for Facebook Connect.

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#67

Post by chaostheory »

jrockway wrote: post #63
chaostheory wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more data we have about a user's behavior the more useful it is potentially for predicting future behavior; whether it's how likely they are to buy brand x from store y or who they will vote for in the next election, and how they influence their friends and family (or vice versa). Right now machine learning is still a niche area for the majority of programmers. Looking at open source software landscape for ml, th…

I don't get why it's a big deal if Facebook knows who you're going to vote for or what brands you might buy. I suppose that because people buy or vote for what they're told to buy or vote for, this will let those wanting to influence people more effectively spend their money. But the solution to that is not AdBlock, it's education. Smarter people mean less susceptibility to manipulation, which is what we are really t…

> I don't get why it's a big deal if Facebook knows who you're going to vote for or what brands you might buy.

It depends on who buys the data and / or the interpretation of that data from them. Just imagine a country like China buying it to predict who will become a subversive and arresting them before anything happens, something akin to pre-cog crime. When I think about it, we can probably aleady do this somewhat accurately with all the data we can collect right now. We have all the tools: open (and affordable proprietary) ML software, open big data frameworks (hadoop, storm, actor model, cassandra), as well as the cloud (AWS, Rackspace). People just need a comprehensive set of data.

> Smarter people mean less susceptibility to manipulation, which is what we are really trying to achieve, right?

Not necessarily, you can't constantly consciously fight thousands of years of evolution; but that's another topic.

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#68

Post by beagle3 »

jrockway wrote: post #56
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?

This protection is NOT about the value of the social graph. And neither is Facebook, BTW - that turned out to be a gambit to get where they are.

And where they are is that they know everything about you (biographical info, hobbies, affiliations, marital status, number of kids, sexual preferences, web sites you visit and when), independently of who you know.

Right now, fb are only (?) using it to target ads at you, but you can be sure that all three letter agencies are cc:ed on every database update

It's about not letting Facebook track your every move on the web and beyond (or, more accurately, not let every site snitch on you to facebook).

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#69

Post by aristus »

nikcub wrote: post #27
sneak wrote: post #21

I said this yesterday on the original discussion. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033475 Good that you ran with it, though, and illustrated the point. Perhaps a better headline would have been "Facebook is still tracking you across the web even after you log out", though. Generally it's only hackers that know what "enough" means in this context, and Facebook's market is, as we all know, much much bigger than us.

not that I want to turn this into a pissing contest, but I emailed this to them on the 14th of November 2010. I emailed them again on the 12th of January this year. I have been sitting on it for that long. I updated my post to make that clear, that this is an issue that is almost a year old.

Normally the security@ team is very responsive, and not that hard to find:

https://www.facebook.com/security

As for your specific claim about cookies, there is a little checkbox labeled "Keep me logged in" or "Remember me" on the login page. If you don't trust the terminal, don't check that box. Leaving it unchecked will set the personally identifiable cookies to expire at the end of your browser session.

This is the same advice given for any website about unsafe terminals, and anyone who has 15 years of security industry experience would be aware of cookie expiration. What exactly are you claiming here?

Re: Logging out of Facbook is not enough

#70

Post by gallamine »

buro9 wrote: post #25

These are the AdBlock Facebook rules you want: ||facebook.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net ||facebook.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net ||fbcdn.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net ||fbcdn.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net The key is to allow FB's CDN when on FB, but to disallow it and everything else when no…

What are the ramifications of doing this? Is all explicit sharing also disabled?
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