From internal leaks within the company as well as external analysis, the tip of the iceberg behind Facebook’s spyware empire is exposed. Take a look to better protect yourself when you’re not even on the platform: https://simplifiedprivacy.com/facebooks-corrupt-off-platform-surveillance/
Duh. Like this isn’t news. In fact, their tips for avoiding Facebook tracking you are terrible. VPN + VM? Still going to track your data habits through finger printing which is not specific to hardware or browsers but browsing habits. Of course, as well, you can’t control your friends or family’s habits which are going to upload pictures and other data about you. Facial recognition is going to tie your data to anything you put your picture on. None of these things actually help. They just take the algorithm an extra millisecond to compute the data.
Even if you and your family got off of Facebook right now, Facebook would still understand your browsing habits and realistically they don’t even need to be accurate, just enough data to massively sell that data to the NSA or advertising agencies or whoever else. So, I’m not saying get a Facebook account but I will say, don’t make your life harder for little to no gain.
It can and has. There’s no way I could keep in touch with old army mates. They won’t all move to other platforms. I don’t even know of an alternative for group chats and finding people.
Unfortunately I have to go along with it. I keep it locked down as much as possible, use it only on Linux desktop etc. But there you go.
I have a tablet in my kitchen I use while cooking. I have only couple of apps on it, it does not sync my contacts and I don’t use it to browse the web daily. That’s when my WhatsApp client is installed. I still get messages, just not instantly. With Facebook groups you don’t have to be online 24/7, you can just check them from time to time.
Telegram, discord, mastadon, signal, session, etc there are too many to list
Discord is my solution. I made a server, invited my friends in EU and we blab away for hours whenever we want, including video calls. We are happy with it 🙂
Not in my experience. Anyone I need to talk to has a phone. Everyone else has email or snail mail. Simple.
But YMMV.
Using weird anonymization techniques will also make you more unique. Disabling JS, running in a VM and having uncommon settings in general will make you very easy to follow around.
You can not use Facebook with JS disabled. uBlock Origin is an option to reduce facebook off the platform. Running a VM is an effective strategy for isolation of certain sites. No solution is perfect, nor is it for everyone.
You cannot do a whole lot without JS to be honest. My comment was not about Facebook but fingerprinting in general, though I kinda forgot to mention. I suspect finger-tracking strategies are kinda trade secrets so it probably varies. Running a VM still expose your VM settings, which basically let them track your VM around. This is the insidious thing about fingertracking, you can be followed around with spoofed data just as well. The very first time you will login anywhere, whether you use a VM or a VPM everything you touched with those settings will now track back to you.
Honestly, account or not, they are still able to track you in full. It doesn’t truly matter if you have an account. They track everyone with or without an account. So all I am saying is don’t make your life harder by deleting an account and thinking “Haha, I got one over on Facebook, they can’t track me now!” They can, and are, and have a full profile on you. GDPR fines are just the cost of business. They can afford it and make more off of the sale of data than they get fined. It’s a net positive.
How can Facebook track your browsing habits if they can’t access third party cookies?
Ok, so if I visit a travel site with a Like button, then Facebook knows someone visited that site.
Later if I visit a sports site with a Like button, then Facebook knows someone visited that site too.
But since I don’t let Facebook store cookies on my browser, Facebook still can’t link the first visit to the second one. Or link those visits to any future sites I visit. So how it can serve personalized ads on them?
If third parties agree they can send Facebook plenty of information when you visit to figure out who you are.
Even sharing information, how do they build a profile without third party cookies?
For instance, suppose I visit a travel website on Thursday and a sports website on Friday. Even if they work together, how do they figure that the person who visited on Thursday is the same as the person who visited on Friday? And how would Facebook match that when I visit them in order to serve a travel or sports ad?
If I ban third party cookies, use a VPN, and obfuscate my browser/hardware, then I don’t see how they could build a profile that follows me around the web.
You are correct that facial recognition and any data put into facebook would still be tracked regardless of the steps you took. You’re also correct that your friends and still leak info about you. However, I strongly disagree with your criticism regarding VPNs and VMs. A VPN is something you should be doing anyway, this is not really news to anyone here. And regarding VMs, the article does not say it’s for everyone, only those with a high threat model that want to use facebook anyway. It is not true that if you browse in a KVM machine with a given fingerprint, that it would lead back to browsing outside it. You are correct that a VM is a lot of effort for most people, and in fact, the majority will not choose this route. But this is educational material for those who ARE interested, this is what some choices are.
Everyone should use uBlock + Facebook Container. It’s still far from perfect, but every step counts.
I wish Facebook Container worked on mobile, whenever I would click a link that went to Instagram or FB it would endlessly refresh and never resolve so I had to get rid of it. They need to port containers over officially
One thing that really bothers me is Instagram “hearing” conversations. I swear the app is listening in, even with the microphone being disabled for the app. My wife & I would talk about a certain product or restaurant and sure enough, we see ads for it on Instagram the next time we’re on it. Very disturbing.
Could it be confirmation bias? Regardless, physical kill switches for microphone, camera and gyros/accelerometers is a necessity.
I have experienced it, and in my experience it was in no way possible for it to be confirmation bias. My wife and I sometimes do something weird where we just talk for hours. Crazy I know, but we bounce ideas off each other to an extent that we get into conversations about stuff we have never talked about nor ever searched for. Not even anything remotely close to related to things we search for.
We used to have and use a lot of Google home minis. Within hours we would see ads for the exact thing we were talking about. We would see ads for thing related to conversations we had within hours. We started getting hyper vigilant about it. We started randomly talking clearly and loudly about nonsense subjects and products that we have no sense to talk about and waiting to see how long it would take to see a suggested ad pushed to us by Google. It usually took less than 24 hours no matter what it was. This went on for months.
It became a running joke to us and I would walk into the room and say something like “I would love to buy a farberware brand vegetable peeler. There is nothing more that I would like than to purchase farberware brand appliances and homewares”. My wife would laugh, and usually before the end of the night I would have large targeted ads on my phone for farberware appliances.
Honestly since we stopped using the Google home minis (since they barely work with anything due to googles bullshit software support) it happens far far less.
I have noticed the same thing as well. I don’t understand how they can do this without microphone access…
The therapist / client thing is so true. Within the last year I had an old therapist from like seven years ago show up in “people you may know” suggestions and one of the most annoying things is they don’t tell you why they think you know each other. Proximity? Is that person uploading contacts? Who knows.
