Mad at Meta? Don't Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data | Hacker News Reader

Mad at Meta? Don't Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data

eff.org

140 pointsdoener99 comments

There's a facebook share button right next to the article. The jokes write themselves : https://imgur.com/a/TbIjZSV

I agree it's ironic, however they seem to use an inert version of the share button. The default share button by Facebook contacts Facebook when you view the page, doesn't matter whether you click the button or not. The one used by EFF only contacts Facebook when you click it.

It's still directing traffic to them and providing content for them to monetise. Also, it doesn't use the nofollow tag.

Spreading the message inside FB helps the mission. The people who already stopped don’t need to be convinced anymore. ;)

But sure, ironic and counterintuitive.

What happens if you've never been a Meta user? I have never had any kind of business relationship with Meta (so far as I know), and have never agreed to any contract or terms of service. What can I do, under US law, to minimize what they store about me and my behavior, or at least keep tabs on them?

Is this rhetorical? Nothing. Every website that adds their code will be tracking you. Every friend, acquaintance, or anyone that you’ve shared your contact with for what ever reason that has given them access to their contacts has provided your info for you. There’s nothing you can do about it.

At the rate we’re going, it will soon be law that you have to allow them to track you. The Zuck just hasn’t figured out yet that if he writes larger checks, he can get an executive order that would benefit him.

How does Meta track me when blocking the JavaScript from Meta controlled urls?

Your face on a geotagged photo.

- Server-Side Tracking with CNAME Cloaking & Direct Server Calls

- Image-Based Tracking withPixel in No-JS Mode

- URL Parameter Tracking

- First-Party Cookies from Partner Sites

- IP & Fingerprinting

- Social Graph Inference

- Embedded iFrames & Cross-Site Requests

F#^$^%$$ Suckerberg...

"Is this rhetorical? Nothing" Nonsense, and the article addresses this. "Block Meta’s Trackers"

It's not nonsense. Meta will have a shadow profile of pretty much everyone, wherever the person in question is blocking their trackers or not.

It's still a good idea to block them, because it will reduce the amount of information they'll have about you, making their shadow profile less useful

Nonetheless, Meta knows you exist and will almost certainly be able to tell some things about you

"What can I do, under US law, to minimize what they store about me and my behavior, or at least keep tabs on them?" "...Nothing" "Nonsense, and the article addresses this. 'Block Meta’s Trackers'

The parent said nothing could be done. I say that's nonsense and listed a thing that could be done. You respond it's not nonsense and then list the same thing I mentioned.

I am very confused by your thought process.

Then you have a very easily confused process yourself. They did not make such a declarative statement as you suggest. They just said that blocking them is still a good idea even though it's not going to stop Meta from knowing about you. Being able to see the details in someone's comment is easier when you don't have a preconceived agenda

I can see where you're coming from.

I'll be honest, when I read the initial comment I interpreted his question to be closer to

"stop Meta from collecting my data to a meaningful degree"

vs how you've interpreted it -

"reduce the amount of data Meta tracks even if only marginally"

That's why the response saying "nothing" made sense to me, because blocking the trackers only has such a minor effect on Metas tracking.

Thank you for explaining, I appreciate it. I could see we were talking past each other, but I wasn't sure how.

Great, what about people that cannot install blockers?

What about sites that sell the data they collect to Meta? If you think Meta's trackers are the only way Meta collects data, then you just need to learn more about data collection.

They'll keep a shadow profile on you anyways. If you want Meta to not know you exist, it's probably almost impossible.

It's almost certain that you've agreed to privacy terms somewhere (even if just a misclicked cookie box) that has the lines:

"You consent to processing... by us and our partners..."

Where the partners list includes 400 or so companies, one of which is for sure Meta.

Would this hold up on court? No idea. But I'm sure Meta will happily take you consent and run with it, as will all the other companies.

The option to accept or decline cookies is, unfortunately for parent, not necessarily legally enforceable outside the European Union and the United Kingdom. There might be an argument that Meta cannot track a user after explicitly offering the ability to opt-out (promissory estoppel?), but I rather doubt it.

In the EU/UK, the argument is academic, as the GDPR requires ongoing consent to track a user: you can't sign away your privacy in perpetuity.

If you live in one of the states that has strong privacy regulations send Meta a data deletion request. Or if you are curious about the data they have on you, send them an access request to get a copy of your data, and then a deletion request.

In some cases Meta ignores these requests. If that happens to you then complain to the state regulator. Both sending requests and complaining is easy as sending an email / filling in a form.

> What can I do, under US law, to minimize what they store about me and my behavior, or at least keep tabs on them?

Nothing. They just make shadow profiles. You can sue them (see Google), but they get a pat on the back.

Shadow profiles

I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger which should mitigate tracking via the "share with Facebook" button. I also use Cookie Autodelete (except for whitelisted domains) which should make tracking via cookies next to impossible. Users can be fingerprinted via other means, and I know my fingerprint is unique, so I try to make my fingerprint different every time. For this I use a UserAgent randomizer (which unfortunately breaks some sites (e.g. youtube), which then have to be whitelisted).

I think this should minimize the impact of their tracking, but surely the Hacker News crowd will now give me suggestions for improvement.

IMO, skip all the "FB settings" shenanigans and instead just block all Meta (and Google while you're at it) properties using a Pi-Hole on your whole network. VPN into your own LAN with Tailscale and use the Pi-Hole for DNS resolution and never see that shit on your phone again, either. If you want to go a step further, you could do this blocking at the router/firewall level, if you have hardware capable of this.

So how do I make my mom do this? /s Seriously, even I would have to spend a day or two to figure this out. We need something simple for 99.99% of people to use.

Yeah, my point is that toggling some settings in Facebook won't do much of anything if you don't want to be tracked by these scumbags. I mean, regardless, your mom doesn't have to do anything if you swap her crappy ISP-provided router with a new router running opnsense or pfsense (and a bit of configuration to block the Meta-related domains). Entire households can become Meta-free with a single hardware swap. It doesn't require that much tech knowledge to do it - the one tech-savvy person in an extended family of dozens can do this stuff.

I get it. A lot of people on HN seem to think every family has a tech nerd in it to do this. I’d rather we had spa consume solution for it. But I suspect we’ll never get there.

Once you have things running, all you have to do is connect your mom's phone to your vpn.

Setting up a piehole at your mom's house would require your mom to do nothing. But it will break a lot of things that she'll prot complain about.

Tailscale is a bit overpowered for just using custom DNS. Even if it’s “free” for personal use.

A simple WireGuard server setup at home configured with my custom DNS resolver to block known tracking urls and setting up VPN profiles on devices works for me.

Yeah the problem (for me anyway) with doing a normal VPN is having to open ports on your router. Though, not the end of the world, but with Tailscale your firewall can continue to block all incoming from the outside world.

The thing is, its not just Meta. It's anyone with a square inch of pixels that you can slap an ad on. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Meta gets a lot of flack, but it's easy to stop using Facebook. It's a lot harder to stop using Google or Amazon.

It’s pretty easy to stop using Amazon.

It’s also pretty easy to stop using Google - Kagi and proton will get you 70% of the way there

Google is more than just a search engine for many people... Shared calendars, documents, maps, mail, mobile OS, browser, etc.

Kagi has a great browser, proton has mail and calendars (I mean everything has calendars, there isn’t really much lock in there), maps are (location dependent) very fungible.

The OS and documents are trickier as I’ve never used either but I did only say 70%. The thing I would find hardest would be converting sign in with google accounts

If the average person was so inclined, they could probably degoogle themselves 70% in one day, 90% in a month, and 98% in a year with very little cognitive load

The online shop or AWS?

More like impossible

> it's easy to stop using Facebook. It's a lot harder to stop using Google or Amazon.

Not in my country, where Facebook owns basically the entire messaging space through Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. I have been able to switch my default search engine, email provider, mobile OS, office suite, etc. from Google no problem, but the network effect has been too strong to get most of my friends out of Meta's ad network. It doesn't help that most groups and basically all events are organized through there.

The only real messaging alternative with significant adoption at this point seems to be Telegram, which I cannot support for numerous reasons, primarily for the founder selling the entire user base of vkontakte to an authoritarian state.

Can you use signal?

They could, but its unlikely other people in their network will.

some of us do but the adoption is too low for any meaningful network effect

Not solution to the network problem, but you can bridge/puppet Whatsapp, Instagram, telegram, to matrix.org.

How can you bridge WhatsApp to matrix? Can you still send pictures?

https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp

Have a look at ROADMAP.md, but the short answer is yes.

As sibling said, using the mautrix bridges. I started with just bridge mode I think, and then switched to puppet mode, which seemed to integrate much better. Pictures and everything work fine.

However, you have to maintain a homeserver, which is not for everyone. If wouldn't have one already, I would just pay the element.io service which includes bridging (but I haven't tried it out).

Over the course of 5-6 years, I managed to move everyone that is important enough to me to Telegram. I don't care about privacy at all, I just couldn't stand the wrong abrasive spit-in-your-face whatsapp UX. It's funny how facebook was enshitified long before it was cool.

Now I don't have notifications enabled for Whatsapp and I rarely answer messages there. It makes me a freak by many standards but I'm free from enshitification in this regard!

One thing I have noticed is that local businesses don't have websites any more, they have Facebook pages instead. So if you want to find out about local events, Facebook is the only way.

As a Swede, the Amazon comment is funny.

They came here perhaps two years ago and everybody I know agrees they suck and can not compete with our local alternatives. They're not cheaper and the website is an utter mess of auto translations and dark patterns. Order flash storage and pray it's not counterfeit. We use Prisjakt[1] to compare prices and price history between shops.

About Google... Yes, YouTube is hard for me to avoid. I use StartPage for search (which is Google search proxy just like DDG is a Bing proxy). Switching to DDG wouldn't be that much of a sacrifice. I don't have a Google account and YT works well via RSS. FreshRSS is basically my YT frontend.

Facebook is the hardest to leave, without a doubt. Civil society isn't organized around any of Amazon's or Google's services. Parent group for school? Facebook. A group for your neighborhood? Facebook. Local trading of goods? Facebook marketplace. I've made the data takeout and have been hovering over that account deletion button I don't know how many times... But I don't follow through.

So, I respectfully don't agree. :)

[1] https://www.prisjakt.nu/produkt.php?p=6498581

It took 20+ years for Amazon to supplant the retail infrastructure in the US. They may just be getting started in Sweden.

Highly (and sadly) likely. They're obviously not in a hurry.

I'm reasonably sure that if you will block every single Amazon owned address at your entry firewall, a majority of the apps or sites will stop working for you. That's what is implied by saying that it is not possible to avoid Google, Amazon and either one of the MS or Apple.

I've never seen anything indicating that AWS does any level of user level tracking of people who access the instrastructure it sells on, have you?

I understand AWS is part of Amazon, but I think in the context of this discussion they're quite fairlt being treated as isolated companies.

If anyone is interested, there was an experiment about that. A week without either of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook. And last week without all 5. Very illuminating.

https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-l...

for non tech ppl it’s too complicated to turn off ad settings. Just work with those close to you to export data and delete account. And you don’t have to do it all at once. You can delete X for them today and instagram next months. It’s a rehab process for addicts, they need your continuous love and care, or they might go back to those drugs.

The only way that the ever-growing risks inherent in being dependent on centralized platforms will ever be addressed is for "non tech people" to start learning about tech.

There is no way to reconcile "I want to trust other people to do things I don't understand but are critically important to me" with "I don't want to allow third parties to have control over things that are critically important to me.

You can neither do it yourself nor hold your fiduciaries accountable without having at least a foundational understanding of how things actually work.

. The society is holding together by some level of trust others. Over emphasize individual self dependence is not helpful IMO. But instead of trust the big platform, we can go back trust people near you in the real world. As the more technical person in a small community, we all holds responsibility to help out.

> The society is holding together by some level of trust others. Over emphasize individual self dependence is not helpful IMO.

The maintenance of social trust is entirely conditional on the ease with which people can revoke it or transfer it to others. The ability to exercise the right of exit is the primary thing that mitigates fiduciary risk and allows trust between individuals to be established. Society is a network of relations among individuals, and it only exists as a consequence of people exercising individual autonomy.

People having the means to do things for themselves in a pinch is precisely what enables them to trust others without fear of being abused.

Having been involved with personal computing from its inception, I believe that companies made computers difficult to use for whatever reasons, be they catering to “power users”, business or just plain inattention to the non-techie user.

Apple was better in this respect, but in recent times, has vast mysteries. I have written up how to save tabs in ios Safari and (this is real good) how to convert a webp file to jpg or png on ios. It’s frickin baroque. (Vastly easier on a mac) But I digress.

Centralized web apps allowed people in essence to create web pages (without SeaMonkey). Apple had the key to hypertext with HyperCard and dropped it. And by the way, average people were writing their own apps in HyperCard. I was writing complex scientific graphing apps for work in HyperCard, and outputting EPS files for tech pubs.

I saw a simplified computer “for old folks” and can relate that when my non-tech brother got tired of reinstalling his drivers with every Windows update, switched to a Dell Linux system, packaged and supported and after some initial questions about apps to use, hasn’t asked me anything in years. It’s not that Linux is streamlined or simple. It’s just that when you install the 4 apps you use all the time, life is good.

I can’t say what should have taken place, because that’s in the “woulda coulda shoulda” basket and it’s best just to move forward.

> I believe that companies made computers difficult to use for whatever reasons, be they catering to “power users”, business or just plain inattention to the non-techie user.

I don't think that's quite accurate. "Power users" are simply the users who bothered to learn how computers work. Dumbing technology down to the level of people who couldn't be be so bothered is precisely what's lead to all of the centralization and abuse. It's also diminished the value of the technology itself, since simplifying user interfaces to a level that fails to express the inherent complexity of the system makes its full functionality inaccessible.

Trying to make things "easy" leads to making them less powerful, less adaptable to the needs of the user, and less accessible and responsive to users who do care to learn how they work. At the end of the day, there's simply no way to attain the full value of technology without significant risk exposure if you don't put at least a little time and effort into understanding it.

I remember when "power users" were the ones who wrote reviews (free publicity). The classic story is Jerry Pournelle, who started writing but became hooked on personal computers themselves, and I would read his stories of the evolving hardware and software. It became clear that vendors would feed him new products so that they could score in the articles he wrote. [0]

> Along the way, he began to write, but wasn’t able to publish. “I became an aerospace engineer, not a professional writer”

> “I paid Tony Pietsch to build me the best machine he could, and paid him $12,000 all told,” Pournelle noted. The computer ran a program called Electric Pencil, the first word processing program for home computers, which had been released just the year before. Pournelle later began using a program that Pietsch programmed, which offered some improvements over Electric Pencil.

> Authors saw the potential immediately. “Larry Niven saw my system, loved it, and had Tony Pietsch build him two of them,” Pournelle recalled. When he later threw a party at his home, a number of other authors “saw my system and wanted one. Greg Benford got Tony to build him a copy, and several others got Tony to find them someone local to them who’d do it for them.” The race to adopt the PC was on.

IIRC, he tired of becoming a computer reviewer. It was a long time ago, and old copies of Byte Magazine are online.[1] I think it was Byte. Old timers (make that microcomputer pioneers) can correct me if I remembered this poorly.

[0] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/jer...

[1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine

P.S. I was one of those power hungry types and got into Unix in a serious way around the time of the Mac Classic/Plus. The Mac won on fontography, Unix on insane productivity. I would reduce data, and write reports with data plots in a couple of days while the personal computer users took a week. grap, pic, troff.

IIRC, Jerry Pournelle was was still writing hardware and software reviews right up until the very end, well after Byte. He was publishing on his own Chaos Manor blog, which was always a great read.

As long as the business model is built on monetizing personal data, they'll always find workarounds

I find it hilarious that the article starts with "are you mad at Meta for trying to appease the guy at the head of federal government" and ends with "we need strong federal privacy laws". It's the same federal government, you either trust it to legislate or you don't.

The federal government is not a unitary organization. It's logically consistent to both not like the president and want congress to pass privacy laws.

The right federal privacy laws would protect people regardless of the flavor of the 4 years if they're actually enshrined in law and would take something other than an executive order to undo.

That's the way it's supposed to work, yes. But it requires you to get the courts to agree and the executive to enforce. Which isn't a given anymore.

I trust the Federal government, if it follows all the procedures with all the safeguards in place.

Trump is neither the government, nor is he "the laws", nor allowed to make laws.

https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/three-branches/what-...

That's the way it's supposed to work. But it requires both the courts to say so, and the executive to follow along.

Even when the executive doesn't follow along, the President never is "the government", and never "the law", in the context of what the comment to I replied called "hilarious". When I say there should be human rights, and that some tyrant sucks, that's not hilarious just because that tyrant has goons ignoring the law.

The current administration is an.. unprecedented one to say the least. Maybe I'm old.

It's not just about the US or the current or previous US govt: there are billions more tech users in EU, Canada, Asia, Central & South America, Africa. They also have differing levels of electronic privacy. EFF has members in those countries too.

The next major accountability moment for measuring the use of tech will be the 2/2025 German federal election, Canadian and Australian elections, also Chile, Norway, SG. When combined with 2024 (US, UK, France, India, SK, [0]) should at least give a pretty rich readout on the state of digital media and privacy, also YT/FB/IG/TT/Twitter/Bluesky/Rednote

[0]: Pew Research: "Global Elections in 2024: What We Learned in a Year of Political Disruption" https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/12/11/global-electio...

An addict can't use occasionally or use less ... there is only 1 way to quit. You have to actually quit.

Mad at Meta yet trust their settings? That's gotta be a small crossover in the Venn diagram.

That was just EFF's first recommendation. Their next recommendation "Install Privacy Badger to Block Meta’s Trackers" is much more effective.

Mad at Meta? Don’t work there, and don’t let your friends work there. It’s unethical.

Great message. I wish the instructions were even more succinct and direct.

Eh, I personally gave up and accepted that I lost the war. It’s kinda nice to be a normie who doesn’t care about much about it. Basic ad blocking, and just generally not caring about what happens with my data. Does it sound awful? Absolutely! But it feels weirdly free, compared to my 2020-self.

To be very fair though, I just use WhatsApp because that’s the messenger of choice for basically everyone in the world. And Facebook marketplace/groups.

MalwareBytes browser extension.

Blocks all the shite. Mobile version too.

So instead of meta getting your browsing data, your AV gets your whole PC data that they will sell too.

According to Malwarebytes' privacy policy, they do not track user location information and only collect minimal data necessary for functionality, like license key validation, and do not store or track your online activity when using their VPN service, prioritizing user privacy; however, they may collect anonymized data for improving their software through analytics.

>only collect minimal data necessary for functionality

>however, they may collect anonymized data for improving their software through analytics.

So they do not unless they think of a plausible enough sounding excuse. anonymization with the massive amount of unique data a AV can collect is also nothing more than a empty promise.

it's truly mind boggling that in current year any vaguely tech literate person would believe a for profit proprietary software company would not data harvest the shit out of any bit they can because of worthless text on a website they could change or circumvent at any time or just ignore without any real repurcussions (pity fines don't count).

No I'm not mad at Meta, keep up the great work.

Reading this comment from my Quest 3 and thinking "why are people who don't use facebook but get great value from the e2e encrypted whatsapp still mad at Meta"

I feel like only a few years ago the EFF was a non-partisan organization but for the last year every article of theirs I read has a distinctly American progressive perspective. Anyone know what’s behind the change?

I’m struck by the complaint about loosening moderation, right next to a complaint about censorship. It’s a very unprincipled take from an org I used to respect.

I don't think they've moved at all. It's more that the Overton window fell off a cliff about 10 years ago.

They've always been about protecting privacy and liberty, just not the liberty to bully and harass people.

[EDIT] Wrong parent.

I believe this is the wrong place in the thread. Did you mean to comment to the parent?

I agree that the American political parties currently represent rather niche positions that most people don't feel aligned with - they're pretty poor generalist labels for the various constellations of moral sentiments that we find in society.

Are you kidding? They have literally been the most progressive tech advocacy group in history. I’ve been donating annually since it was founded. They’ve been consistent. Maybe you’ve moved more to the right?

Historically, the EFF has been very pro free-speech. Now it seems like they're in the free-speech-but-only-if-we-agree-with-you camp.

Can you provide examples? I don't feel like opting out of data collection is a very good example there.

I definitely feel like the ACLU took a turn for the worse in that direction a few years ago. I'll be sad if the EFF is also headed that direction - they've struck me as one of the only ones that's still willing to stand on principle

In this very post, the EFF premise is that you are upset about Meta’s shift to less censorship. Meta’s new policies are a win for free speech.

There's a huge difference between "acknowledging other people are upset" and "actively advocating against freedom of speech".

Being in support of free speech doesn't mean being explicitly tolerant of every possible opinion or political/philosophical/ethical viewpoint. I can assure you without any doubt that EFF is not sitting there fighting for someone to advocate for genocide, for example.

Further, defending privacy and free speech also means protecting from people/institutions which would act against privacy and free speech, i.e. the "paradox of tolerance" is very relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

The democrats are basically the institutionist and "status quo" defenders of American hegemony at this point. Doesn't matter how "left" you go, they are basically the 'conservative' now.

Also, saying the EFF is nonpartisan? The EFF always had a strong political point of view. If you label it right or left, that's your problem.

Could it be that red states aren’t passing privacy laws? No snark intended. Privacy seems pretty “anti-business” when you consider that it’s a type of regulation in any form. I share the same idle curiosity because I’ve followed the EFF for years too, but the more I think about it: did they ever stand a chance with Republicans?

It also seems like big tech is aging into or adopting a kind of partisanship. These companies are so unfathomably large it’s almost difficult to look at their market impact as positive. Mind you, I’m not trying to make a particular case here. I’m only espousing a general attitude. The share of the S&P 500 that they collectively occupy alone is looking increasingly concerning.

Texas Data Privacy And Security Act

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/consumer-protection/fil...

Hey, I didn’t know about this! Thank you for sharing.

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