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Comment by FargoPelz | Hacker News Reader

If you're concerned about "consign[ing] my personal data, beliefs, preferences, relationships, work history, daily plans, and private messages to a massive advertising corporation" but don't want to miss out on seminal life events, why not just maintain a Facebook account without ever posting to it?

As long as you remain friends with people you need to keep in touch with, but never post anything or fill out your personal details, you will not be giving up any privacy or missing out.

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They'll still know where you live, where you work, what devices you use, what places you travel to, what hotels you stay in, what times you're usually awake, who your friends are, which friends you're more interested in, what invitations you respond to, what invitations you ignore, which of your friends are interested in you, what your hobbies and interests are, what texts you send on messenger, what other websites you visit on the internet, ...

Should I go on?

Don't use the app and they won't know most of that.

Also don’t let your friends and family use it, block their Pixel, don’t let them buy brokered info on you, don’t let anyone else with Facebook on your WiFi... and do this all perfectly 100% of the time.

They can't track you if you're not using their app on your phone. Use a sandboxed version (there are many) and it's not running and tracking you other than when you're actually using it. You can also sandbox it on your computer if you like, but there are many privacy blockers that will keep them from tracking you all over the web if you want to just use it in your regular browser.

You do give up privacy just by having a profile on facebook. It makes it easy to tie your browsing habits to your account, even if you are logged out. See previous discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14694451

This is why I only check Facebook using Chrome, on my home computer, using Firefox for everything else (with ads/trackers etc blocked, obviously). And of course I've never installed any facebook apps on my phone. I have checked mbasic.facebook.com from my phone a couple times, in an incognito window; that seemed like it was probably a reasonable level of risk.

Naive. Facebook does more than just passively let you fill out surveys, with their Pixel and snooping on your texts and contacts being just a couple of examples.

Could you elaborate? I'm concerned about these things myself, so I already don't use the Facebook app on my phone. What else can they collect?

Every website you visit that has a Facebook beacon on it. They collect this even if you're not a Facebook user.

I've been aware of this for a while but haven't done anything about it, but since you mentioned it I might as well ask: Is there an easy way to block this beacon? Is it something an adblocker would block by default?

Most adblockers include a list that blocks those beacons by default, such as EasyPrivacy or Fanboy’s Social Blocking List.

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