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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

#91

Post by EvilTerran »

Evbn wrote: post #82
EvilTerran wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ef…

Awesome, so their monetization strategy is to undermine the whole product and say "trust me"

Jesus H Christ, knee-jerk harder why don't you.

Any browser add-on could be monitoring your entire on-line activity. Why the hell does that suddenly become a problem when one's up-front about what data they collect, when they collect it, and what they do with it?

And no, they don't say "trust me". As I mentioned in my first comment, they say "if you don't trust us, unpack the add-on and check the source yourself". Which you definitely can - I just did it myself to verify, and it looks like easy reading to me.

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

#92

Post by nnnnni »

bti wrote: post #88
nnnnni wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think he wrote the Lifehacker article he linked to.

He was advertising it on HN, not LifeHacker, with that comment.

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

#93

Post by jpswade »

Evbn wrote: post #83
jpswade wrote: post #67

Am I the only person who would actually prefer targeted ads based on things I might actually be interested in, rather than the crap I've been exposed to before. If you're going to use a walled garden like facebook, you expect to see walls now and again.

Since they have proven that they are awful at targeting, I don't want it. The fact is, 90% of advertising exists because the product is not worth buying in its merits. Word of mouth recommendations and independent research studies are where good jnformarion comes from. Targeting doesn't help that.

I think every effort they make to better target is only a good thing. Attempting to block their efforts will skew their results which could lead to worse ads.

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

#94

Post by w1ntermute »

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.

Yeah, that left a bad taste in my mouth. Just switched back to Ghostery.

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

#95

Post by jimSc55 »

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...

I'm interested in Disconnect. Your FAQ says you don't record personal information like IP addresses but what about statistics? Ghostery, for example, has an opt-in option to submit anonymous stats on blocked content. Do you do the same?

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

#96

Post by tripzilch »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #69
dsl wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the "fake unsubscribe" thing. In a previous life I did infrastructure consulting for people with ROSKO listings and they collected and processed every single unsubscribe. They even traded unsubscribe lists. Back then everyone was using pinks (contracts with an allowed quota of complaints per day baked in) for mailing. If you scrubbed your lists against unsubs and bounces, you got less complaints an…

I agree, I've seen a few but not many, and when they Email me again I just mark it as spam and never see another one. Email is commanded by algorithms right now, which take a heap of hints from their users, it's seriously stupid not to unsubscribe people kind enough to unsubscribe instead of marking you as spam.

Last year I read an article about someone doing an experiment with unsubscribe links on a very old email address. It got loads of spam, and he clicked all the unsub links (or maybe wrote a script to do it). The amount of spam that address received decreased significantly.

So whether or not the "fake unsubscribe" thing was real (my intuition says yes it was), it appears that times have changed!

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

#97

Post by AgentConundrum »

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…

I don't have Firefox on this computer, so I can't check on that, but you're definitely wrong about Chrome. If you click Edit blocking options and uncheck a tracker, it unblocks it globally.

I wasn't sure of this last night when I wrote the comment, but I just tried it out with Google Analytics (since it's pretty ubiquitous), and it wasn't only unblocked on that domain.

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

#98

Post by thelibrarian »

AgentConundrum wrote: post #97
thelibrarian wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't have Firefox on this computer, so I can't check on that, but you're definitely wrong about Chrome. If you click Edit blocking options and uncheck a tracker, it unblocks it globally. I wasn't sure of this last night when I wrote the comment, but I just tried it out with Google Analytics (since it's pretty ubiquitous), and it wasn't only unblocked on that domain.

I must be misremembering the behaviour in Chrome/Safari. I guess the site-specific whitelisting must be a relatively new feature of the Firefox version that has not been ported yet.

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

#99

Post by lifeguard »

fnayr wrote: post #38
lifeguard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, your data is never deleted, only your account is "de-activated".

Incorrect (currently). They allow you to delete after you deactivate, but they make you wait 14 days while deactivated in the hope you realize you need facebook.

No. This is marketing spin. Your data is NEVER DELETED. I'll bet you paychecks that FB has archives of all their users data.

One example: a person committed a crime and stored evidence on FB. FB retains user data forever. They might not make it public, but the data is not deleted.

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