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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

> Suppose I go to a restaurant, and I booked using my name and phone number. The restaurant sends that data to Facebook to say "Terence Eden ate at this restaurant on this day." Facebook can then tell if I saw an advert which led me to make a purchase.

That's just great. So I guess the gift that marketing agencies have given us is that we can't trust anybody. The only thing left to do is go entirely cash-only and never give any personal details to any business whatsoever.

The marketing industry has become so toxic that it is now poisoning everything.

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Enjoy!

http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html Advertising is a cancer on society (last update: 2019-10-02)

The marketing industry is just an extension of human greed, which has a long history of ruining everything. Things don’t change. They just take on different forms.

Marketing can be legitimate. Marketing includes putting up information about your products and services on your own website that people need to proactively go to to be exposed to. The problematic industry is push advertising, which is pushing information onto people that they didn't seek. That's basically never legitimate.

> The only thing left to do is go entirely cash-only...

Good luck! Lots of brick&mortar stores are going to debit/credit only...

Not in my area. But if that trend goes so far that I can no longer simply avoid using shops that do that, I can always use a one-off card for them, much like I do when buying things online.

Not that surprising.

There is a reason why EU made the GDPR. Its not like it was a law meant to solve a purely theoretical problem

Not sure how you got to that conclusion. A simple ad blocker and not using fb would solve this issue entirely. Transaction data like restaurant purchases is only useful in this scenario if it’s linkable to other online tracking data on you.

That's BS. Even if you don't have an FB account, they can link all the offline places you've been to and purchases you've made through all this data uploaded by merchants.

This data can be sold or leaked. And is readily accessible to governments.

"A simple ad blocker and not using FB would solve this issue entirely".

You just killed my aunt.

Browser ad blocker can't protect you from the actions of restaurant staff, acting on their booking software.

Not using fb can't protect you from fb independently creating shadow profiles with triangulation.

>Browser ad blocker can't protect you from the actions of restaurant staff

Then use a restaurant details blocker? Celebrities have been doing this since the beginning of time. Use an alias. The notion that physical places of business are collecting our data for their own purpose is not really a new one.

> Use an alias.

Yes, this is what I was calling out in my original comment. We need to remember to treat physical establishments as attackers.

Yeah that's not actually true. Celebrities call and give their real names because being famous means there's always a table available even if when there isn't one for regular people. Source: In a past life I worked at a destination restaurant in the front of the house.

Do non-celebrities try to game this?

I don't recall that ever happening. I suppose you could although I think most people would be too embarrassed to do so. Seems like a Seinfeld kind of a situation(John Voight's car.)

Yes I know a guy who looks like a C-list celebrity, he has called ahead and gets a table with bottle service. A little bit of research would show the real celebrity is in another city at the moment but they never do that.

I'm not sure how you are drawing that conclusion based on what this post presented:

>"Suppose I go to a restaurant, and I booked using my name and phone number. The restaurant sends that data to Facebook to say "Terence Eden ate at this restaurant on this day." Facebook can then tell if I saw an advert which led me to make a purchase."

An ad blocker and not having FB isn't going to stop a restaurant from participating in this FB program. And if you follow the short URL of the Twitter user the author quotes, it links to a Privacy International report that states:

Facebook routinely tracks users, non-users and logged-out users outside its platform through Facebook Business Tools. App developers share data with Facebook through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK)"[1]

So the combination of some random app on someones phone built with FB's SDK and a brick and mortar retail establishment using Facebook Business Tools seems like it is enough to thwart even a fairly ardent privacy advocate. I'm not seeing how an ad blocker would help against the combination of these two things. It's also well known that FB maintains shadow profiles and buys offline data.

[1] https://privacyinternational.org/report/2647/how-apps-androi...

Thank you for the details, but I must still be missing something. FB shadow profiles aren't valuable to anyone unless they also know who you are, which is my point. Say the restaurant sells your transaction data to FB and they add it to your shadow profile... now what? If you're using an ad blocker, FB won't be able to link any other online activity to your profile and ad targeting won't work because you're blocking them.

The next step someone would probably say is that other sites you transact on might also be selling your info to FB, but again how is that valuable if they can't know who you are until you either login or enter your payment details? Generally speaking, your profile info is only valuable for advertising (people want to get you to their property to buy things - once you're already there your profile value is a lot lower). If you effectively shut down the advertising funnel entirely what's the issue here. Yes, it's bad from a general privacy standpoint, but what else?

>"Thank you for the details, but I must still be missing something. FB shadow profiles aren't valuable to anyone unless they also know who you are, which is my point."

Shadow profiles are valuable to FB as it provides data on the interests of a FB user's real life friends. I don't doubt there's categories along the lines of "has 2 or more friends who regularly frequent wine bars in West London" or something similar.

> A simple ad blocker and not using fb would solve this issue entirely.

No, it doesn't. This issue is unrelated to using the web or Facebook.

> Transaction data like restaurant purchases is only useful in this scenario if it’s linkable to other online tracking data on you.

It's also useful if it's linkable to to other offline tracking. But that's beside the point -- the point is that I don't want this data to be sent to these companies without my consent. Whether or not it's actually useful to those companies is a completely separate issue.

You've made the mistake of assuming that any significant fraction of the population even cares.

Whether or not anyone has this information is totally irrelevant to me, and I'd imagine this is true of upwards of 95% of the population. And hey, if it leads to restaurants bringing in more people, it'll lead to more restaurants I like staying open instead of going under...

So just accept fascism, surveillance states, and surveillance capitalism? No thanks

No, but I love me some hyperbole.

Something tells me that you also love you some sarcasm.

> You've made the mistake of assuming that any significant fraction of the population even cares.

No, I haven't. I wasn't commenting on what most people care about. I was commenting on what I, and people who think similarly to me, care about.

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