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Comment by isoskeles | Hacker News Reader

> If they were targeting Amazon, you would probably say "Targeting Amazon and not Google or Facebook for tech monopoly is not a good luck."

Nope.

I don’t have Facebook and have zero interactions with ANY of their products in my life. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have been harder to extricate myself from. I could, but the inconvenience as a regular consumer would be quite difficult or costly. This hasn’t been the case with FB so I am in very strong agreement with the sentiment of the comment you replied to.

I actually hate Facebook but am reflexively disgusted with the irrational, partisan hatred of it from people who could just delete their accounts and never interact with the company again. At worst, they still log your IP on many websites if you don’t use uBlock or something similar.

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> At worst, they still log your IP on many websites if you don’t use uBlock or something similar.

It's fairly easy to think of worse. One clear example is the fact that they've been running facial recognition on non-Facebook users in photos for years.

I can understand an opinion that claims this is worse, but it’s something I don’t personally care about because I don’t take many photos with people who would post them on Facebook. It also occurs in a more public setting than private internet browsing.

At this point, I’m think it’s safe to assume they every picture saved remotely is facial recognitioned. And every public photo has been processed by at least Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.

It sucks but certainly isn’t anything unique to FB. It would be weird if they didn’t run it through CV even to find stuff like dogs, babies, etc.

> I don’t have Facebook and have zero interactions with ANY of their products in my life.

Maybe. But if any of your friends/family is on Facebook, they may have uploaded their contacts, and you quite likely have a "shadow profile" that they're using to track you across the net. You might not know Facebook, but Facebook knows you.

Is that really an issue? Its really a missing data problem. Your data is "missing" and facebook can infer with some probability you exist and the people your "shadow profile" might interact with.

That’s pretty much all there is to it, yeah, just a missing data problem. But once you slap the “shadow profile” label on it, it gets “shady” and “scary”. A pretty cool lesson in how to make something fairly trivial and non-threatening seem scary to people.

Note: not currently or in the past employed by Meta or any affiliated companies, so that’s just purely my own take.

If six of your contacts have provided them with the same name and email address, then they know with near certainty that those six people have you as a mutual contact. When they spot an ad profile with the same email address, that comes with a dossier on your browsing and shopping habits, which are used to infer your interests etc. It's not a "missing" data problem, it's an embarrassment of data problem.

Irrational hatred? It's a company that literally was complacent in a genocide. The fact that I haven't logged in during several years doesn't change that.

Just ignoring companies that do harm and saying you don't have to use them is one of the ways companies continue getting away with perpetuating harm.

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