Comment by settsu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by settsu | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps ironically, I'm frankly astounded at the apparent naïveté still held about Facebook, Google, et al.

> I have never used FaceBook [sic] login for anything

> Facebook doesn't even have my phone number, only my name and my business email address.

People, if any company has A-N-Y-thing that can be associated with you, online or offline, you have no privacy. None. It is gone forever.

There is billions of dollars at stake for companies to build as complete a picture as possible of you and every detail of your life. And billions more remains on the table. That is plenty motivation to fuel a highly-lucrative market for accurate, meaningful profiling for years.

Sure, there's a long list of actions you could take to begin minimizing your exposure, the practicality of each varying widely. But frankly, most of them would only serve to make going about daily life inconvenient. (And the correlation between effectiveness and convenience isn't 1:1...)

The best case scenario is your data becoming stale, such that its values diminishes to a degree that makes it effectively background noise.

There is simply no means of unembedding yourself. But also, more discouragingly, for most people there is no practical means to avoid being ingested.

edit: grammar

You entirely missed the point of my comment when I said

> I have never used FaceBook [sic] login for anything

That was in response to someone saying you could avoid this by not using Facebook login. Maybe before calling out others' naïveté you should work on your reading comprehension.

Fair enough, I misinterpreted the context of your comment. But I wasn’t calling anyone out and my point is still valid regardless. (And besides which, my “point” was just expressing surprise, which doesn’t need validation or qualification.)

> There is billions of dollars at stake for companies to build as complete a picture as possible of you and every detail of your life

Do you mean that purely in the sense of marketing and advertising? i.e. they want to market to me as effectively as possible, so that's why they're going to these great lengths?

Yes. Google and Facebook revenues, for example, are almost entirely from advertising and their ad business models hinge on being able to sell their ability to target very precisely.

Every data point gathered builds towards a more comprehensive knowledge they have on you. It hardly matters if you never log in to a third-party site using credentials from Facebook/Google/etc., that's just icing on the icing on the icing for them. They'll know if you logged in regardless, as long as their widgets or services are in place on a site.

While cookies are certainly the most common means of following you around the internet, there's other means of fingerprinting that, while perhaps not as laser precise, certainly provide more data than most people realize.

Why do you think ISPs are so ardently against people's ability to use them as dumb pipes? And why has the smart TV platform landscape grown like gangbusters (spoiler alert: Roku's CEO has outright said why https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17595384/roku-ceo-anthony...)?

edit: clarifying grammar

Thanks. Sorry if my question seemed like I was challenging you, I was genuinely curious to know if that was the reason why. Makes perfect sense and your explanation is very helpful.

I like to think none of it applies to me because I don't consume, but that's another story :)

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