Facebook will show ads to non-Facebook users on other websites
wsj.com
wsj.com
...or by using a wide-spectrum blocker like uBlock Origin, and for the cookie warning problem there is a solution too: "EU: Prebake - Filter Obtrusive Cookie Notices"[1]
[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamja/Prebake/master/obtr...
content-security-policy:
default-src * data: blob:;script-src *.facebook.com *.fbcdn.net
*.facebook.net *.google-analytics.com *.virtualearth.net *.google.com 127.0.0.1:*
*.spotilocal.com:* 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval'
fbstatic-a.akamaihd.net
fbcdn-static-b-a.akamaihd.net
*.atlassolutions.com blob:
chrome-extension://lifbcibllhkdhoafpjfnlhfpfgnpldfl;style-src * 'unsafe-inline'
data:;connect-src *.facebook.com *.fbcdn.net *.facebook.net *.spotilocal.com:*
*.akamaihd.net wss://*.facebook.com:* https://fb.scanandcleanlocal.com:*
*.atlassolutions.com attachment.fbsbx.com ws://localhost:* blob: 127.0.0.1:*;http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
I also block
127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 platform.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 assets.pinterest.com
127.0.0.1 www.pinterest.com
127.0.0.1 gravatar.com
I wasn't on Facebook, yet in the "hey, join FB" message they listed 6 of "people I know that are already of Facebook".
So imagine how much data they got about me: 1) No account on FB 2) But FB tracked me with their cookies on almost every page, because almost every page has some FB widget (fanpage box, like buttons etc) 3) They know "some-random-guy-9348239849" likes to browse pages A, B, C, D, which means he likes AA, AB, BA, BB, BC, CA, DA activities 4) Then people start giving away "their" data about me. A lot of them did, so FB could connect who I know, and their connections with each other. 5) So FB got "my-name-PERSONAL_DATA", not associated with the data from point 3. 6) I got that message 7) If I'd click the welcoming link, then I wouldn't even need to register - FB then could connect that "some-random-guy" data with "my-name" data.
This probably goes even deeper, but we just don't know that.
Facebook with that message told me way too much about how much they know about unregistered users, I bet they don't do this anymore :)
Your folks filling out a form on Facebook saying that they have X children, your friends sharing their contact list with LinkedIn/Google/Facebook and you're on it, your workplace profile being crawled, and so on. Unless you go full on hermit, there's really no way to not be part of Facebook either actively as a user or passively as a shadow profile.
Exfiltrating this data, or even so much as seeing the entirety of it also appears to not be possible to see what bits of your information have been gathered, to know who has access to it, to know what it's being used for, or even to deny them the ability to make profit on this information. It's incredibly frustrating, as if any individual citizen were to do this sort of reconnaissance and data gathering on another citizen, it'd be called stalking, and people would have legal means to redress. But the fact that even those who have not agreed to the Facebook TOS are still profiled and sold and used for profit without the aforementioned persons' consent seems very wrong.
Also, all ad blockers block google analytics like tracking services but social plugins are generally opt in. I guess they should be blocked by default too.
Do you know the ones that do?
I've never tried Privacy Badger myself, what's your reasoning for having both? Is it not quite as all-encompassing as it claims?
Browsers and Internet commections now have enough discoverable stuff via HTTP and JS to identify users uniquely enough that in 99% of cases the user's session can really get a unique id! Across publishers! Without third party cookies!!
So now what?
And the big picture is, regardless of these small imperfections, a digital fingerprint is over 95% accurate! So that's very valuable!
For added goodness, I also run the Blender Add-On[1] for the sites I do allow on occasion. I value my privacy <b>MORE</b> than the marketeers do.
I'm running uBlock + uMatrix. Very clean browsing experience. Also quite bare-bones before adding site specific rules, which probably won't suit everyone :)
I use the latter for network-level blocking (dnsmasq on a DD-WRT router; forced DNS redirection), and it works surprisingly well - even the ads on my Xbox One dashboard are blocked.
We're going to need strong tracking protection in browsers by default, and very soon. If Mozilla won't do it (you can enable it in History settings, though), probably Brave, or some upstart browsers will. Same goes for uBlock and other extensions.
Not parent. I am not particularly famiiar with that legislation, but if it says that allowing websites to use your API and embed links to your site and profiting from the data in some way is illegal.
I am saying that.
To me (and my searches on Facebook) it has always appeared that Facebook search is a crippled and neglected product. It's so bad that I save important information I see on Facebook elsewhere. Facebook is the place for the ephemeral and constantly "new" stream of stuff to keep people clicking. So it doesn't seem to have had any good reason to put competent people in search related development so far.
The Google Display Network has a lot of data because it is a large display network with lots of inventory, and it can follow cookies around the web.
I'm ignoring a couple of nuances with this answer, but it is not true that searching for something on Google will lead you to seeing ads for that thing on unrelated websites. If you click on a search result, and end up on someone's webpage, and then they add you to a remarketing list for the Google Display Network -- that's a different story, but that's independent of Google's network, because the same is true whether that website uses AdSense or a competitor.
In other words, we don't share your search queries with anyone. A nuance would be: if you click on an ad, the advertiser knows which keyword triggered their ad to show, so they can guess at the nature of your query that came before the ad click, and then they can intuit your intent. But that's not the same as your search queries, and we definitely don't let people advertise by saying "show my ads across the internet to people who search on Google for ____." So there's never search query sharing between Google Search and the Google Display Network, for a good reason: we want people to trust us when they enter queries, and if you got chased around the internet by ads related to what you were searching for, you might not search as often.
(I'm a PM on Google Search Ads, and I don't represent Google with my answer but rather giving some publicly available knowledge about how the networks work)
Facebook knows personal details, mood, etc for people who explicitly choose to share these things with their friends, or participate on Facebook in other ways. This may be an oversimplification, but I suspect Google is able to learn much more about a user passively than Facebook is.
Of course it'll differ for different people, but on balance I'd say Google knows _a lot more_ about me than Facebook does.
(...And they probably both know more about me than I do.)
So yes, this news may affect Google, but I disagree that Facebook has an advantage over Google when it comes to knowledge of users.
> Facebook knows personal details, mood, etc for people who explicitly choose to share these things with their friends, or participate on Facebook in other ways.
Facebook knows so, so, so much more than just this. Facebook knows about events you go to and are interested in. Facebook knows the type of content that you are most likely to click. Facebook knows what you are most interested in.
I welcome all competition, I frankly have found Google's dominance in this space to be frightening. I never understood how both Microsoft and Yahoo failed so miserably in this space. It's still possible that Facebook could fail here too, but they have more data and a huge advertising base that they can draw from. Something Microsoft and Yahoo didn't have...though they did have big advertisers, it was hard to get the SMBs, etc.
Doubleclick and Adsense on the other hand are starting to slow down and make up less share of Google's overall revenue [1]. In 2004 it was 50% of their revenue, now it's 20% and it's probably going to shrink even further as AdWords revenue and other revenues(cloud, apis) increase.
> [1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/266471/distribution-of-googles-revenues-by-source/Or you can just block all requests to their domains. I have *.facebook.com and a few others blocked.
About 90% are blocked sites. The rest is local (privat and business) dev configuration.
Not only doesn't it have any negative performance impact, it makes most websites 10x faster.
(And no, there's no dead weight in there. Every single one of those is still resolvable as of a month ago.)
Also they "detect" me using Safari (while I am on Chrome). Seems so trustworthy to me.
Either this whole internet advertising thing turns out to be a bubble after all — in that case; let it pop, see if we can't figure out something better. If using ad-blockers and tracker-busters helps achieve that goal; good.
Or we end up with an internet where all users settle somewhere on the privacy spectrum in an uneasy equilibrium. On the one extreme of this spectrum we have those who accept ads served them through exclusive IOS or Android apps and unprotected browsers, and on the other extreme those who refuse to play along and use ad-blockers and other privacy tools, and simply shun services that require you to opt-in to data harvesting (e.g., Facebook and websites that refuse to show content when they detect an ad-blocker).
I think we may currently have the latter — I wonder how stable that situation is.
Of course it doesn't make sense, but if you have millions from a billion dollar pool to spent on lobbyist and all kinds of dirtbags that are in power, all of sudden rules that have sound people scratch their head, are norm.
> Either this whole internet advertising thing turns out to be a bubble after all
It is a bubble, indeed! The truth is that not enough people (businesses) have tried to find out on their own, so you have always fresh blood coming in!
I still get approached few times a month by a friend who own small business. The conversation goes something like this: "Wow Facebook has billion people in their database, and I can narrow them to age and interest. Oh I see 25 million people are my target audience wow if I get 1% of them purchasing my product, I will be filthy rich! And I'm talking about worst case scenario!" Then I go on into long explanation how people don't go to facebook to buy products but to watch silly cat movies their friends upload, I'm never being listened to. Until said friend drop in $150 as a test and get 80 clicks that got him one purchase for $20 worth of product. That's it. So this friend never advertise with Facebook again. But don't worry! There is probably half a billion others waiting to open the floods of business and riches for themselves by unlocking the doors to facebook advertising treasury chest.
Agencies and "those that know what they are doing" are not much better. They will tell you they help you advertise with good ROI, but in reality its the same as every advertising agency promising you first page of google. uhm, no. They all won't fit on the first page. Eventually once you burn $1k or few thousands with agency you realize there is a way to make some money but you would have to have budget in millions to break through with your product. So while Facebook is awesome for Coke and Pepsi to drop million buck before superbawl to fight for your mouth, the average person will usually lose money.
Maybe you're not being listened to because what you're saying flies in the face of all known evidence in an entire discipline called "online marketing", and it also screams "Facebook holdout+privacy nerd rant", which most business owners will politely smile at but know not to take a marketing lecture from.
And now those 125 companies (maybe the 130) know a little more about me, and may be able to fit me into a contrarian niche for more tightly focused advertising.
And all that, so some company can blast us with adverts.
It is sad that they chose to build themselves upon tracking / data-mining / advertising.
Even if they charged a nominal fee[0] of $1 per month they'd have nearly as much incoming revenue and much lower overheads without having to develop and maintain all that creepy stuff. They wouldn't have to play psychological warfare, they could just focus on providing a good product.
'Facebook is free and always will be'. But at the cost of being regarded as malevolent and, therefore, ripe for disruption.
[0] I apologise if this is not nominal to a significant proportion of the user-base.
I really want to know what's the opposing view to this statement. Who's going to step forward and say why they think this is wrong?
At the very least, make an argument like "the AI needed to trick a teenager into spending half their awake time on Facebook can also be used to solve actual problems."
- free video delivery channel, that has created its own industry
- communication tool that has changed news delivery & how people organize protests
- free chat communication (with e2e encryption) for nearly everyone in the world (including some of the poorest)
- on demand data center infrastructure at ridiculously low cost
- instantly freely searchable data set of most of the worlds written information
- self driving cars
- ubiquitous hand held computers
- free easy to use video conferencing
- a social network that connects a gigantic part of the planets population (if you are into that sort of thing)
Just some of the mind boggling technology at least partially funded by internet ads in the last 15 years.
Are there issues that have arisen? Of course, what sort of funding model doesn't have downsides? Acting like working for pay from advertisers constitutes some sort of modern Gallipoli is such a vacuous argument in the face of the staggering amount of tech it has at least partly helped bring about, I'm shocked that the comment hasn't been down voted more.
What you're describing is the advancement of technology, which has occurred at the institutions that have accumulated the most power. Yes, Facebook, Google and others have hired some of the most talented people in the country, and these people have continued to produce useful technology while ensconced at these companies. Previously the same people could be found at AT&T, Xerox PARC, various DARPA-connected institutions, etc.
All you're describing is the shift in the center of power. In the 50s and 60s it was the government. During the 70s, as power began to shift more and more away from government towards private capital, we saw more and more technologists moving into the employ of monopolists.
It is a mistake to confuse this transfer of power, and the corresponding ability to purchase talent, with the output of that pool of smart people. Moreover in Silicon Valley these people are deeply connected to a much broader community of intellectuals (e.g. through HN) - I'd argue that this culture, of which many members currently sojourn in the arms of large corporations like Facebook, is the real productive unit.
Facebook found a money faucet and connected these people to it; but this money faucet could have been anything. It could have been something of real social value, except we have largely destroyed the mechanisms that direct productivity on the basis of social values and now direct it purely based on the interests of private capital, which is currently enamored with data accumulation and targeted advertising.
I'll end here, but I'd also like to point out that a lot of the stuff you've listed here existed long before Facebook and Google were a twinkle in anyone's eye. You're taking things that were literally developed in the 60s and giving credit to them for the private concentrations of power that were built on top of that work.
I'll also stand by my argument that every model of financing these technical improvements (at least that I can think of) have downsides. Compared to the war machine of the 20th century, I find the ads pretty tame. Not to mention that advertising is a lot less coercive than tax based defense spending or government granted monopolies.
- Open Source software: https://code.facebook.com/projects/
- Open Source, eco-friendly datacenter hardware: http://www.opencompute.org/
- Solar planes R&D + partial or total Internet connectivity for remote third world areas that had none : https://info.internet.org/en/
- making a guy rich who has pledged to give away 99% of his fortune to charity?
There are far worse uses for human effort and talent, and even as a non-user you and/or the world are probably getting some dividends already.
But there's also that : https://info.internet.org/en/story/connectivity-lab/
I interned at Facebook on their off-FB ad network and it was really disillusioning. The cognitive dissonance involved with it is intense, and each person's individual justification for their work makes the organization as a whole immune to criticism. There's a lot of social pressure to become comfortable with your work, I felt. Even today, people look at me like I'm an actual crazy person if I say that I didn't enjoy my time at Facebook. A small part of that was due to real problems in the organization, but the sneaking discontentedness was caused by precisely the opposite: the lack of questions raised.
There are lots of really great people there – so great that I can't help myself from thinking about what else they could be building.
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
All this in addition to an ad-blocker (such as uBlock Origin) of course.
I don't even subscribe to the built-in Adblock filter because of my default-deny rule. It also negates the need for Privacy Badger and similar.
See the screenshots for how it works (similar to, but more granular than, uBlock advanced mode).
https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Very-bare-walkthroug...
https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Examples-of-useful-r...
"To help personalize content, tailor and measure ads, and provide a safer experience, we use cookies. By clicking or navigating the site, you agree to allow our collection of information on and off Facebook through cookies. Learn more, including about available controls: Cookies Policy."
Am I signing a contract with Facebook by clicking on their website. Is that legal?
Tha politician was not very happy about the company lawyers change in complying with the "explicit informed consent" requirement, as that is the strongest from of consent that EU directives uses, and it basically is a ticking time bomb until someone abuses this new interpretation. "continued browsing of this website mean that you give a explicit informed consent that you agree to buy our service" is a major concern that I got, but maybe we will need such thing before it get thrown to the courts.
Anyways, as a technically competent, privacy aware user, the first thing I do on a new installation of Chrome or Firefox is disable third-party cookies, install uBlock Origin and subscribe to a handful of third-party filter lists. I also do this for my friends and family, though I am more conservative on their installations.
I wonder where this will land them in the future with France, Brazil, or other countries that aren't as "friendly" with FB as the United States.
you can track me all over the net all you want. I am just not buying shit.
/me opens article
Oh, it's about showing ads to non-users, not about tracking. The article doesn't even claim they didn't track non-users before. Clickbait?
Yes, and it's largely copied from another article (note the long quote followed by "tells the Journal"), so we changed the URL to that one instead. (Submitted URL was http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11795248/facebook-ad-netwo...).
Submitters: HN prefers original sources. If a blog post reports on another article, please submit that article instead. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.