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Facebook detects if you are logged in Gmail

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Re: Facebook detects if you are logged in Gmail

#81

Post by dextorious »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #80
dextorious wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about not logging to Facebook at all? You don't seem like the kind of user FB targets anyway...

Facebook doesn't really have a targeted audience anymore. It's pretty much everybody. At this point its like deciding not to use the telephone because the line could be tapped. Facebook is becoming an essential communications platform for a lot of people. Particularly people under 20.

Essential how?

Your definition of "essential" might vary, but last time I checked there is: mail, sms, phone and talking face to face.

Also, what is "essential" for "people under 20"? Not reading the latest silly high-school gossip from their pals?

Re: Facebook detects if you are logged in Gmail

#82

Post by guygurari »

raganwald wrote: post #19

Not sure how they are doing this, but I have gotten tired of having to play “whack-a-mole” with FB scraping private information from my browser in other ways, so what I have done is sandboxed it: I have a separate “Facebook” account on OS X, and I assume that anything I do on that account is shared with Facebook. I don’t log into Facebook for any reason on my normal user account, and I don’t log into anything else on…

> I have done is sandboxed it: I have a separate “Facebook” account on OS X

At what point will you decide to ban Facebook? Will you stop using their services if they find a way to spy on your cross-browser behavior? Or will you just sandbox them further into a VM, or even another physical machine? What if other sites you use regularly also start tracking you so aggressively?

I deleted my FB account when I learned that more of my profile info was being made public over time. This was before Like buttons.

I was not a heavy user, but this decision had its price; there are people I no longer communicate with because of it. Still, I'm happy I took a stand, all the more so because things have deteriorated much further since then in terms of privacy.

Re: Facebook detects if you are logged in Gmail

#83

Post by k-mcgrady »

dextorious wrote: post #81
k-mcgrady wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook doesn't really have a targeted audience anymore. It's pretty much everybody. At this point its like deciding not to use the telephone because the line could be tapped. Facebook is becoming an essential communications platform for a lot of people. Particularly people under 20.

Essential how? Your definition of "essential" might vary, but last time I checked there is: mail, sms, phone and talking face to face. Also, what is "essential" for "people under 20"? Not reading the latest silly high-school gossip from their pals?

Essential for a few reasons:

Events - a lot of people post events on Facebook and trust that all of their friends will see it.

Photos - a lot of people only share photos through Facebook. If you want to see or download photos someone has taken at an event you were at your probably need to use Facebook.

Email - most younger people do not use email (unless they have to for school/business. Instead they use Facebook messages.

I won't bother addressing you last comment. Maybe your experience of high-scool was different than mine was, which consisted of a lot more that 'silly high-school gossip'.

Re: Facebook detects if you are logged in Gmail

#85

Post by albertzeyer »

MartinMond wrote: post #49

I bought http://fluidapp.com/ just for Facebook. Now I have a nice separate window for browsing Facebook and nothing but Facebook. Separate cookie store is awesome.

Reminds me of my own (open source) project which does the same based on Chrome: https://github.com/albertz/ChromeWebApps

It uses (by purpose) the same session though as the main Chrome instance.

But it should be possible to implement an option to use a separate session. This might even be much simpler than my current approach (which not only shares the session, it also uses the same Chrome process).

Re: Facebook detects if you are logged in Gmail

#86

Post by mike-cardwell »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #6

It's not very hard to do. The trick is to know a resource that only the user can access and then trigger an HTTP request to it. For instance if you have website a and say the user profile "mitsuhiko" can only be edited when you are logged in as "mitsuhiko" on http://a.example.com/profile/edit/mitsuhiko you could use this code to see if the logged in user is "mitsuhiko": Why does this work? Because onload is fired if…

I wrote quite a popular blog post on how to check if a user to your site is logged in to GMail, Facebook, Twitter and Digg:

https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Pri...

GMail doesn't seem to be working any more though. But the concept is still useful to learn.

Re: Facebook detects if you are logged in Gmail

#87

Post by ehthere »

dextorious wrote: post #81
k-mcgrady wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook doesn't really have a targeted audience anymore. It's pretty much everybody. At this point its like deciding not to use the telephone because the line could be tapped. Facebook is becoming an essential communications platform for a lot of people. Particularly people under 20.

Essential how? Your definition of "essential" might vary, but last time I checked there is: mail, sms, phone and talking face to face. Also, what is "essential" for "people under 20"? Not reading the latest silly high-school gossip from their pals?

It's like having a phone number. You'll survive without it but you're making it more inconvenient for others to communicate with you.

Re: Facebook detects if you are logged in Gmail

#88

Post by hack_edu »

dextorious wrote: post #81
k-mcgrady wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook doesn't really have a targeted audience anymore. It's pretty much everybody. At this point its like deciding not to use the telephone because the line could be tapped. Facebook is becoming an essential communications platform for a lot of people. Particularly people under 20.

Essential how? Your definition of "essential" might vary, but last time I checked there is: mail, sms, phone and talking face to face. Also, what is "essential" for "people under 20"? Not reading the latest silly high-school gossip from their pals?

Really though, you're choosing to socially isolate yourself in two ways. First from everyone using Facebook for social organization (the status stream is considered as almost a joke by now by a large portion if users).

But you're also isolating yourself by simply drawing a point that you don't have Facebook anymore. It's an eye roll producer on the level of saying "Oh, I don't have cable/TV anymore." Sure, lots of people agree with that notion but it's used to drive a wedge in-between you and others by most

Re: Facebook detects if you are logged in Gmail

#89

Post by alttag »

pagekalisedown wrote: post #46
mekoka wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a comprehensive choice of browsers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers ). I picked one that I knew I wouldn't need and dedicated it to my facebook usage.

That's a great idea. I think I'll do the same for my online banking.

You make an interesting point--why is it the technically savvy are partitioning their FB usage, but not necessarily partitioning their secure accounts in the same way?

Re: Facebook detects if you are logged in Gmail

#90

Post by naner »

raganwald wrote: post #19

Not sure how they are doing this, but I have gotten tired of having to play “whack-a-mole” with FB scraping private information from my browser in other ways, so what I have done is sandboxed it: I have a separate “Facebook” account on OS X, and I assume that anything I do on that account is shared with Facebook. I don’t log into Facebook for any reason on my normal user account, and I don’t log into anything else on…

It probably would be simpler to just use porn browsing mode to access FB.
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