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Comment by jjtheblunt | Hacker News Reader

> ...because I have much less control over the transaction

made me immediately think "just don't use Facebook?".

You are being tracked, and your network is identifying you (tagging, mentioning you, posting photos that include you etc) whether or not you use Facebook.

This is like telling people who have privacy concerns about 23andMe / Ancestry DNA "just don't use them." Meanwhile their parents or siblings happily open up the floodgates.

How do you tag someone that doesn’t use Facebook?

The fb ecosystem is widely used, many times as a third-party library in many apps. Sometimes those apps send your data to facebook, sometimes they do it for free as a consecuence of integrating their services. And then, there are the "share with facebook" and "I like this" buttons.

https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-tracking-you-even-if-you-d...

GDPR, CCPA, etc. ban this, right? And without a permanent user ID (cookies etc. are super volatile), I’m not sure how valuable this data is.

The GDPR does ban this however it's not being enforced, as proven by the prevalence of Facebook's malicious SDK in any mainstream app.

They're called shadow profiles. If you do a search for facebook shadow profile you'll find a number of articles that talk about how Facebook infers connections between Facebook users and non-users.

Check out Facebook Analytics. It's used in many smartphone apps, on websites etc. It is an analytics platform free of charge for the website/app operators (and gives FB a huge insight into non-FB users on the side)

This is true in some sense.

But it's also true that FB probably has way less data about you if you don't use it.

Given that, most people still happily use it (including me).

I used to have the same mindset until I deactivated my account. I'm not sure about businesses in your area but the ones around here love to use Facebook to post updates on business hours, menus, or use it as their only web presence.

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