Lovely that their blog with privacy propaganda has a cookie banner that is not compliant with any privacy law in any way. Says everything about their efforts, I guess.
No one wrote this article with the intention of "trapping privacy-minded tech enthusiasts."
I mean no offense, but this sort of thinking (that an engineering blog is attempting to attack you) is unhinged. There is not some grand conspiracy. Companies like this are not the shadowy, highly-competent and absolutely evil entities you think they are. They are barely functional to begin with.
“You know, since we're trying to Z but don't have Y, we could probably use X to get Y…” said no inventive engineer ever.
No conspiracy needed. This happens.
A tech company using a blog to get whatever imaginary consent from random anonymous privacy-aware individuals is so many levels of unhinged that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
I'm certainly not saying it happened, or will happen, here. I'm saying it definitely happens.
This is why in regulated industries, there's an emphasis on "data minimization". Much like the principle of least privilege, but applied to whether you're letting your people or systems be exposed to it in the first place.
It's easy to follow a least privilege policy if there's an actual technical control not just agreement, and even easier if the control is "I never had it, didn't derive it, and made sure I couldn't if I wanted to".
If you aren't collecting it for any use, even inadvertently, you can't retcon it into availability for alternative uses.
This simply isn't within the realm of reason.
Engineers at Meta have far more impactful problems to solve than attempting to reverse engineer the browsing habits of the 12 privacy-sensitive tech enthusiasts reading their engineering blog.
From a ROI/time perspective, it is far in the negative for a single junior Meta engineer to spend even 10-20 minutes investigating this. It literally is not worth anyone's time.
Most of what's said by people who actually known what they're talking about is drowned out by low-effort, conspiratorial, semi-intellectual laziness.
Taking it a step further - I frankly don't think normal people are positioned to make any decisions or hold any opinions strongly about tech. They are so mislead by journalism it's not even funny.
My doctor friends feel similarly about medicine and how it's reported on (and the populace's common opinions on medicine.) The average person/voter is immensely mislead in basically every field they themselves are not an expert in.
One really just has to think through the situation rationally, even assuming the most greediest of intentions:
> Clickbait to get every privacy-minded tech enthusiast on their site
Turns out the market of privacy-minded tech enthusiast is tiny and they hate clicking on ads. Trying to cajole this group into giving you money is pulling teeth.
Understood.
Let's deploy the same set of company resources and effort on the 99.99% other people in the market place, increase some efficiency by like 0.1% and make waaaayyyy more money.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Also, I don’t think that the parent comment was being serious.
-- Ah yes, Hanlon's razor, one of the CIA's more successful PsyOps. --
But then I was shocked to learn that the Razor's namesake Robert J. Hanlon actually did work for the CIA and now I dont know what to think.
https://wydaily.com/obits/2019/04/09/robert-j-bob-hanlon-70-...
Different parts of the company working together is hard/rare enough. Them conspiring together... forget it.
They may be serving more compliant versions based on geolocation, though.
> To help personalize content, tailor and measure ads and provide a safer experience, we use cookies. By clicking or navigating the site, you agree to allow our collection of information on and off Facebook through cookies.
- They are not asking for consent, there is just an ok button. - They assume consent when you navigate further on the site, this is not valid consent. - Consent needs to be for specific, well defined purposes. “help personalize content, tailor and measure ads and provide a safer experience” are three purposes in one and none of them are well defined. - They are probably already setting the cookies in your first request, when you have not seen any information yet (did not check)