Facebook tracking users with background sound (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Facebook tracking users with background sound (2012)

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79 pointsddtaylor19 comments

I think the title is misleading. This looks like a sneaky way to "phone home" using a `bgsound` tag to fetch a resource from FB's servers (instead of an `img` tag). No sound is actually played.

I agree, when I saw the title I was thinking something like "la liga" android app that did tracked users using audio to find out pirate transmissions of the soccer games. This is nothing like it.

Whoa I hadn't heard his this. Interesting.

Doesn't Instagram and such also track users using ultrasonic tags in media?

They don't. It's frequently been alleged, but is not true. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/28/18158968/facebook-m...

From that article, after a bunch of paragraphs about how Facebook probably isn't listening to your speech (but also isn't trustworthy):

> Another report, published in Wired last year, explained how hundreds of apps use “ultrasonic tones” to track where you’re going in physical space. These apps need access to your microphone, but not to actually listen to you, just to “beacon” noises emitted in stores and by advertisements. So ... rest easy.

I believe Nielson also uses audio tags.

Nielson does do this, but only for users who have explicitly opted into one of the panels, which they pay people to be part of.

Aren't the audio watermarks still present regardless?

Yes.

It's also from 9 years ago?

I actually understood the title as-is, but that may be indicative of my age (mid-30s) and could see how someone in their 20s would have no idea of the horrors inflicted by <bgsound>

I think you can assume all sorts of analog/physical/digital/information theoretic fingerprinting probably has been used to capture huge volumes of data and microtarget people w/o them knowing (especially in any web browsers or phones).

Though until the CCPA/GDPR, it was probably fairly legally nebulus. Still waiting for a privacy act in the US. Since it was a wide variety of actors, we may never know who captured what how.

I think companies like Apple who tend to make margin on the hardware and not the information probably are to be commended by pushing a lot of privacy/extra scrutiny requirements through the platforms they control (iOS, mac, webkit, etc).

Why wouldn't you want tracking your users as a tech company? Some people love condemning it. But that brought so much progress to humanity, if you want to build a good product, you want to know how users use it. You want to know how many users actually read your emails.

How about taking explicit consent before tracking users and not tracking them everywhere they go (both digitally and physically)? Users should expect a right to privacy and control over their own data.

In all fairness most users are willing to trade their privacy for access or features. Most users already give away almost all of their rights and accept terms of service blindly so they can access sites.

Yeah, and we need to change that. This can't be a status quo.

Tracking for improvement of a product or service etc. is different from tracking for exploitation.

Also the risks associated with are different since it would require different length of data preservation and anonymity.

Yes, much progress has been brought to humanity by <squints> making sure end users read marketing emails.

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