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How To Opt Out of Facebook Ads Based on Your Real-Life Shopping Activity

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Re: How To Opt Out of Facebook Ads Based on Your Real-Life Shopping Activity

#71

Post by robbiep »

dmoy wrote: post #22
ordinary wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deleting your account does not stop Facebook from tracking you, unfortunately.

Does Facebook actually delete stuff yet? For a long time they wouldn't delete accounts, photos, etc.

5 years ago (I had been a fb'er since 06) I deleted every message is ever received - took me an age but finally did it.

Kept an empty inbox for the next 3 years.

2 years ago (or thereabouts) Facebook introduces a new messaging setup (about or a bit before their new interface, I've forgotten what they call it) - all the messages were back, all the way back to my first messages sent jn 2005.

Scary.

Re: How To Opt Out of Facebook Ads Based on Your Real-Life Shopping Activity

#72

Post by RexRollman »

darkchasma wrote: post #32

Or, just don't use facebook. I'm not trying to be facetious, if you don't trust the company with your most personal information then you probably shouldn't be using their service. Because that is what they trade in.

From what I understand, Facebook builds profiles of non-members as well, so they are still a threat.

Re: How To Opt Out of Facebook Ads Based on Your Real-Life Shopping Activity

#73

Post by nnnnni »

byoogle wrote: post #18
w1ntermute wrote: post #4

I highly recommend Ghostery. I've been using it for quite a while now and have no complaints.

Lifehacker just did a comparison of popular privacy extensions and called Disconnect the best (over Ghostery and others): http://lifehacker.com/the-best-browser-extensions-that-prote...

Yeah... You really should have put a disclaimer in there to let everyone know that you were advertising your own product.

That makes me never want to try the extension, no matter how good it may be.

Re: How To Opt Out of Facebook Ads Based on Your Real-Life Shopping Activity

#74

Post by jrochkind1 »

thelibrarian wrote: post #68
AgentConundrum wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can disable specific trackers on specific sites Either you are incorrect, or this functionality is non-obvious. Based on recent experience, I'm leaning toward the former. When I go to edit my blocking options when a site doesn't play nice with Ghostery, I'm given options either to disable certain tracker-blocking or to disable Ghostery entirely on a given domain. There doesn't seem to be an option to stop block…

The way to do it is not obvious, and varied by browser. For Chrome and Safari, click on the Ghostery icon to bring up its popup control, then click on the 'Edit blocking options' link which will give a checkbox list of trackers to enable/disable. Click out of the pop-up to close it then, reload the page. For Firefox, bring up to pop-up, then click on the checkbox to the right of the slider, then click on the reload l…

Huh, I use chrome, I thought unchecking on that popup would allow that third party site globally, not just ont he present site.

You're sure?

Re: How To Opt Out of Facebook Ads Based on Your Real-Life Shopping Activity

#75

Post by EvilTerran »

iSnow wrote: post #64
w1ntermute wrote: post #4

I highly recommend Ghostery. I've been using it for quite a while now and have no complaints.

Even though I still use Ghostery, the fact that it was acquired and went closed source makes me uneasy. I don't see a revenue model here - Ghostery is still free as in beer. So I am a bit wary of the moral hazard this poses to the new owner of Ghostery.

From what I recall of their website, they have an opt-in feature whereby the add-on can send them information about what ads are appearing on what pages and the like, and they anonymise and collate the data to sell it. For instance, you could buy a service off them to the effect of "what adverts are actually appearing on my website when Joe User loads it up?"

And I believe I remember also seeing a statement to the effect of "we don't obfuscate the code in our XPI", so you could just extract the add-on as a ZIP file if you want to audit the source.

Re: How To Opt Out of Facebook Ads Based on Your Real-Life Shopping Activity

#76

Post by andyking »

keithpeter wrote: post #56
sillysaurus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Facebook connects the dots online and offline of billion users' buying information and habits, they essentially can electronically understand who you are better than you do, and can predict what you'll do even better. Why are people disturbed by this?

Predictions based on partial data could be problematic. One example: I pay for fresh food and staples in cash, and buy 'grocery' items on a card. A data collection system that tracked only card purchases would give the impression of a very unhealthy diet.

This is how it is for me, too. I buy fresh vegetables, fresh meat, milk, eggs, bread at a local farm shop and pay cash. I buy other things like pizza, coffee, processed foods at a supermarket and pay with card - and also scan my loyalty card.

I regularly get offers from the supermarket for money off yet more unhealthy food - they are blissfully unaware that I eat quite well in reality!

Re: How To Opt Out of Facebook Ads Based on Your Real-Life Shopping Activity

#77

Post by Eliezer »

I actively prefer ads for things I might actually be interested in purchasing. If there were an option to tell advertisers "Please show me more ads about..." I would take that option. whenever I was waffling on some purchase. Most ads suck even so - they don't actually tell me about a new feature or fact that could potentially change or spark a buying decision - but at least it's not a total waste of time.

The only economically productive use-case of marketing is to lead trades to take place that would not have taken place otherwise, or higher-quality trades to take place; which can have its roots in consumer gullibility, but ideally reflects some new company telling me about a relevant product that I didn't know existed. This happens rarely. Having it happen more often sounds like a good idea to me.

Re: How To Opt Out of Facebook Ads Based on Your Real-Life Shopping Activity

#78

Post by [deleted] »

RexRollman wrote: post #72
darkchasma wrote: post #32

Or, just don't use facebook. I'm not trying to be facetious, if you don't trust the company with your most personal information then you probably shouldn't be using their service. Because that is what they trade in.

From what I understand, Facebook builds profiles of non-members as well, so they are still a threat.

[deleted]

Re: How To Opt Out of Facebook Ads Based on Your Real-Life Shopping Activity

#79

Post by Amadou »

nitrogen wrote: post #48
adityar wrote: post #39

if they're using hashed emails for tracking, we're pretty much clucked. There is an option in gmail that can prevent this. if your email is abcd@gmail.com, use abcd+sitename@gmail.com (gmail will ignore the stuff after the + ). You can also use . separators. Now, to keep track of that...

Since Gmail's account name semantics are well known, the top data collecting agencies have no doubt adapted by now. Also, frustratingly, a lot of sites will break, often silently, if you give them an e-mail address with a plus symbol (e.g. it might end up in a GET request to an internal API without proper escaping, and be interpreted as a space).

Yes, the only way to go is your own domain. Use an add-on like Virtual Identity for Thunderbird to keep track of which From address goes with which recipient. https://www.absorb.it/virtual-id (their cert seems to have expired over the weekend)

Re: How To Opt Out of Facebook Ads Based on Your Real-Life Shopping Activity

#80

Post by Evbn »

nnnnni wrote: post #73
byoogle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lifehacker just did a comparison of popular privacy extensions and called Disconnect the best (over Ghostery and others): http://lifehacker.com/the-best-browser-extensions-that-prote...

Yeah... You really should have put a disclaimer in there to let everyone know that you were advertising your own product. That makes me never want to try the extension, no matter how good it may be.

He tried, but his product is so good that it scrubbed out the identifying information in his post.

(Kidding)

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