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Comment by useEffect | Hacker News Reader

my hack is just to not have facebook

My hack is being just young enough that having a Facebook would make me feel old.

You have rather succinctly noted that sodding huge walled off communities come and go, with time. ::FAC3:B00C: is already very old school and largely irrelevant. They just haven't noticed yet.

Whither Geocities and Compuserve?

Facebook makes shadow profiles of you anyway

Then facebook gets to track my shadow self.

Why would a person who objects to Facebook tracking them via their actual profile not object to Facebook tracking them via inferences?

because the far-parent problem was 'facebook has ads that target me.'

an easy way to avoid the problem of seeing ads on facebook is.. to avoid facebook.

yes, this doesn't solve the privacy and ad-affiliate network problem -- but that wasn't the stated problem.

Yea they can track my shadow profile all they want and I don’t care. I don’t visit them so they aren’t showing me ads.

They lease your behavior to other advertisers, insurance companies, loan guarantors…

Source? It's always been my understanding that while smaller players do this, the major ad players - Meta, Google, etc - never do this: Data on everyone is their greatest competitive advantage, and they don't want to give it away!

How do they know what my behaviours are if I don't have Facebook?

You don't have, but many sites you visit have a Facebook code hidden in their pages that sends data about any visitor to Facebook. Thus Facebook knows a lot about you even if you don't have an account.

Fair point!

I'll answer but I don't think you want one/it... They're different. That's why. Simple.

One you're giving them information/still seeing ads

The other, they're guessing and you're free from the mind rot. Distance surely hurts their accuracy.

Can't stop them guessing but you can stop being their authoritative source. You've heard the whole, "we're in charge of our response, not the problem", right?

That's a great answer, thank you! Yeah, "someone non-consensually has low-accuracy information on me" is experientially different than "someone is using (more-accurate) information on me to serve me ads". The former's still not _great_ (they can still pass that information to other people which could lead to bad experiences), but it's still much better than the latter. Thanks for the clarification!

I have a hard time believing that Facebook does a particularly good job with its shadow profiles. They can't even figure out which continent I live on or narrow my age down to more than a couple decades off.

For the times I need to wade thru the muck mbasic + adblock means the only ads I see are recommended groups. Those are usually history geeks focused on cities thousands of miles away from anywhere I've been in the past decade.

But I'm addicted to the feed!

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