Wherein I ridicule Facebook some more, then collaborate with the Panopticon
dnalounge.com
dnalounge.com
On a related note, run 'Facebook Disconnect': https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-disconnec...
Adblock doesn't stop you from Facebook tracking you with their 'like' buttons, this 'Facebook Disconnect' extension will.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ju2jJJ_...
I emailed jwz, and he blames a reader here for a DDOS, specifically a synflood. Please knock that off.
- Individual products like AdRoll and Perfect Audience let you track users and show them ads. Ever been to a site and had their ads pop up everywhere afterwards? Ever looked at a product then gotten ads for _just that product_? Yeah, that.
- Google lets you track conversions based on a ton of information. What Google ads users viewed, sure, but also referring site, region, demographic info. Hell, it'll tell you which pages you visited before buying. Everything but the search term you used ... unless the referrer was AdWords.
- Emails all send you unique links, which allow you to do conversion tracking. Hell, you can even embed retargeting pixels in emails, so when you open a company's email, they can serve you ads based on that knowledge.
Every possible way that tech can track you, companies are tracking and advertising with. I get that it's kind of scary, but it's not just Facebook, and a lot of it is the digital equivalent of reading body language on people in your store.
So, yeah, run an ad blocker. But not just for Facebook.
The particularly pointed anti-FB sentiment stems from their selective policy enforcement, the privacy issues weren't specifically targeted.
It's scary because it is unregulated, automated harassment. What if you have compound PTSD? Does google know what to remind me of and what not to?
> digital equivalent of reading body language on people in your store.
Yes, data is the body language of the digital world. Thank you, that is the perfect equivalent.
It's not 100% reliable, and an intelligent person has the capacity to subvert it, in order to establish their own personal privacy.
I care more about intellectual privacy than I do about any other form of it. If people believe it is 100%, then they have to prove telepathy exists.
After opening a few tabs, I switched back to the address bar and started typing "[store name] " (where [store name] is a department store that sells all sorts of things.)
"[store name] [product]" was the very first suggested search result in the address-bar drop-down.
I don't think the suggested query service includes Adwords results. This would suggest, then, that Google added a retargeting feature for its own sake, to help users; or, in other words, retargeting is something that just falls out of optimizing suggestions for relevancy!
Has this guy worked anywhere before? (Yes, it's a joke, I know who Zawinski is). I am sure there is a faction in Facebook who thinks their filter system needs an overhaul, and I'm sure this post will go on a big pile of "why" somewhere. However, if you're asking an engineer who works near (but probably not on) something to go talk to another team, you need to be somewhat polite. Because you're not asking them to do their job - you're asking them to go tell a colleague that they aren't doing theirs. You want them to spend political capital internally to make Facebook/whatever better for you instead of spending it on what they think would be best.
I don't think he's a hypocrite for using and hating Facebook. That's just life. I think he's forgotten that people, even Facebook employees, have ideas and agendas other than his own and you need to be diplomatic if you want them to serve yours.
If anything I think it helped that his rants were rude, since that made it clear how much he cared about the problems.
Startups are different though. What you wrote is probably a lot more true of a company the size of Facebook.
What kind of broken ass backwards corporate culture requires expending political capital just to report a bug across teams? If someone is letting pettiness degrade the quality of the product like that, they're bad at their job.
It only tracks when you actually use the button.
(also mentioned in the comments of the original article, but IMHO worth spreading)
This new tool specifically offers a way to beat the "prison effect" of products that are subject to the network effect.
The issue you touched on won't be easy to fight. I think that as long as these social platforms don't need to use any common protocol (like email), the natural state is to have a single major player with smaller ones maintaining pressure to improve and add new features.
I'm apparently one of the only people who likes Google+ for this sort of thing but no matter how hard I decided to bug and annoy people, there's no way I'd convince enough of them to migrate all of that stuff over there. Same goes for any other competitor. And unless you want to maintain redundant profiles for more effort (and more of the unavoidable marketing stuff) you can't just strike out on your own without defeating the purpose.
The fact that Facebook was the first to get your mom and your professor and your boss and your mailman to sign up means that they've got an incredible advantage. There's just no way to get that many people to opt into something else, especially as resistant to change as many are.
And unlike email, I can't just switch to G+ and keep bullshitting with my friends on Facebook like I switched to Gmail and kept emailing friends at Yahoo or Hotmail. Imagine if in order to change email providers, you had to convince everyone else to switch as well. We'd still be using our AOL addresses from 1993.
Not in one day. It's always a process. And with a system like iWouldDo.it, you "switch hypothetically" (using a pledge with a condition) and when your condition is met (i.e. "Alice, Bob and Chris are ready to switch, too"), you switch for real. Which results in other peoples' conditions being met, which makes them switch as well, etc. etc.
I can't think of a reason to put a fb Like button on a web page anymore.
There are several products that help deal with this, but they don't get nearly enough attention. The one I'm familiar with is PrivacyFix [1], but there are several others that should also be investigated if this matters to you.
Also, for those whose eyes hurt from the matrix color theme the site uses, you can change the colors by opening up console and running:
document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].setAttribute("style", "color: #333; background-color: #ddd");
And what did I find? There was a 90% complete profile waiting for me. All my friends were already lined up, my personal data was already there, my photos were already there.
And thus I learned to love the Big Brother.
Thus I will proceed with activities more fruitful than trying to fight the windmills.
> I don't like facebook either, but can't we just not use something without making a huge sensational scene about it?
We are social creatures who could never survive alone without communicating information about how to interact with our environment. Cyberspace is now our environment.
Even that crazy Luddite in a cabin in the woods learned to skin a deer from his Grandpaw.