Comment by uptown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uptown | Hacker News Reader

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"If you want to log into a website using Facebook login, Facebook needs to know what website you are logging into."

Agreed. But what if you don't want to log into that website, or maybe that site has no login at all. If it has a Facebook "Like" button, that site still sends a ping back to Facebook, letting them know you were there, and feeding Facebook's algorithm about your interests. Same goes for Google Analytics, a Twitter share button, or the growing list of tracking scripts which get executed upon page load without even showing a visual indicator that they serve some purpose.

I'd guess that the vast majority of visitors have no idea that by visiting a 3rd party site, they're feeding that visit to the list of 3rd party trackers you find on many sites today.

If people were educated with how the internet works they would know that the second you load some piece of content from someone else's servers they have your information as well.

> If people were educated with how the internet works they would now that the second you load some piece of content from someone else's servers they have your information as well

People aren't. That's why we have laws like Lemon laws [1]--so everyone doesn't have to be a specialist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_law

Yes, clearly every website user should have an in-depth understanding of how DOM elements are generated on the browser. Seriously, how can one know how a button is produced on a page without inspecting the underlying source code, or looking at the network traffic on the developer console? Even then, this behavior can be obsfucated in the code, and in order to produce the page to generate the content to inspect, you've already generated the remote ping.

You don't need to do that detailed of an analysis. If you see a YouTube video in a website, YouTube knows you saw the video. That simple.

I'm trying to understand what you people that are reacting to this Facebook incident so emotionally actually want done

Do you want logging ip addresses to be banned? Do you want cookies to be banned? Do you want embeddable html to be banned?

Because all I see is outrage without any real suggestions

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