[HN Gopher] Facebook Shadow Profiles [pdf]
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Facebook Shadow Profiles [pdf]
Author : Jimmc414
Score : 182 points
Date : 2022-02-18 19:15 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cesifo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cesifo.org)
| axegon_ wrote:
| That shouldn't be a surprise. At an old job with far smaller user
| base, we used to do something very similar and while the shadow
| profiles were not materialized in the form of actual profiles,
| the amount of data you can gather about someone just by having
| his/her number pop up in the contact list of several of your
| actual users is staggering: full name, workplace,
| city/neighborhood where they live, their partners, their hobbies
| and all sorts of things which you generally should not know. And
| we are not talking people who have their entire life published
| online, but people with little to no online visibility. Assuming
| that facebook is not doing something similar considering that
| their main business comes from profiling and modeling user
| behavior is just naive.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| Seriously. Once a mobile app is granted access to contacts, it
| has your entire social graph. Every app since 2012 has been
| building these shadow social graphs.
| spullara wrote:
| Well before 2012. Started as soon as you could access the
| address book through an API - not just on the phone. First
| one that got a lot of bad press was Plaxo which launched in
| 2002.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| That got me curious. How would hobbies be inferred? Is it
| merely from association?
| shimon wrote:
| Presumably association including temporal association around
| events that are described by others. If I text <shadow
| friend> frequently around the time I post about frisbee games
| and bluegrass concerts, odds are they are engaged in those
| types of activities with me.
| slg wrote:
| Facebook also has shadow profiles for non-users that connect
| directly to name, email address, and/or phone number. At the very
| least these seem to be populated when people share their contact
| list with Facebook.
|
| I have long wondered whether they can match these two kinds of
| shadow profiles together. One profile with personally
| identifiable information. The other profile with detailed
| browsing history. That would raise a huge privacy concern
| especially since these are non-Facebook users and therefore
| people who have not opted into this at any level.
| tacotacotaco wrote:
| I was told by a friend that when they uploaded a picture with
| me in it Facebook auto tagged me. I have never created a
| Facebook or Instagram account. I want no business with that
| company. I am annoyed that I am still profiled by them.
| kibwen wrote:
| In the grim darkness of the near future, nobody leaves their
| house without painting their faces with CSAM in order to
| prevent cloud services from storing their images.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Wow, that's pretty dark.
|
| On the plus side, pedophiles working at Facebook will have
| a great time. /s
| disqard wrote:
| Did you happen to read this today, or did you just come
| up with that purely by coincidence?
|
| https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/16506/facebookmeta-
| exec...
| cryptonector wrote:
| I saw it yesterday. Yes, I was referring to that.
| namrog84 wrote:
| Too late. And even if did that. that could likely be
| deanonyimized with little effort.
|
| For those who don't already know, it takes very few data
| points to deanonyimize someone's data.
|
| With greater effort and efficiency you can have even less
| data points.
| rapind wrote:
| Gait recognition already exists.
| iratewizard wrote:
| Moonwalk everywhere and copyright trolls will do the
| rest.
| roywashere wrote:
| This could happen because previously people explicitly tagged
| you in their photos, so in new photos you're auto tagged
|
| On one side it is weird, on the other side it makes sense.
| For example: Einstein is not an FB user. But if people upload
| photos and tag him it makes sense after a couple photos FB
| learns what is Einstein
| strulovich wrote:
| But you need a FB account it page to actually tag someone,
| no?
| dylan604 wrote:
| I think you missed the point about SHADOW PROFILE
| c22 wrote:
| I killed my facebook account years ago, but back then you
| could write anything you wanted in a tag.
| apollo1213 wrote:
| Direct link to view the pdf file:
| https://docmadeeasy.com/v/003107877
| kleinsch wrote:
| If I'm reading the actual paper correctly, they looked at Nielsen
| data from 2016 and figured out that FB trackers fire for a large
| percentage of web traffic for both FB users and non-users. Their
| conclusion is that it's likely FB has the data to be able to
| build shadow profiles, not that they have any indication FB
| actually does build shadow profiles.
|
| I would be curious about an update based on newer data. 6 years
| later, even more traffic is mobile where privacy protection is
| stronger and GDPR has companies more concerned about data sharing
| and trackers. I'm sure if you included mobile traffic, the trend
| over time is dropping (with a big dip when iOS 14 came out).
| netsharc wrote:
| Zuck was asked about shadow profiles during his congress
| hearing. He replied "I'll have to get back to you on that,
| senator.".
|
| There is also "Your off-Facebook activity" (I guess depending
| on jurisdiction) which shows me online stores that uploaded my
| data to FB for ad targetting purposes, sadly I use the same
| "junk" email for online shops and Facebook, and FB's page
| showed me a lot of businesses who gave it my data!
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > Zuck was asked about shadow profiles during his congress
| hearing. He replied "I'll have to get back to you on that,
| senator.".
|
| I'm pretty sure that you could ask Mark about loads of
| existing ads products at FB and he would say the same thing,
| as he basically delegated all of ads to other people.
| romanhn wrote:
| Yeah, I was really curious about the current state of things,
| but lost interest after reading the abstract, which was very
| careful to use "may" everywhere. It's quite a leap to go from
| "they could do X if they wanted to" to "they're doing X". FWIW,
| when I worked at Facebook the internal narrative was that
| shadow profiles were not a thing. Given that everyone had
| access to source control, one would think any enterprising
| engineer could easily contradict this, but I don't recall it
| being actively questioned internally (while many of the
| company's policies were).
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Man, i hate finally admitting this on HN, but I spent a bunch
| of years as an FB employee, as a data scientist (on ads).
|
| I can speak with complete sincerity and say that shadow
| profiles were not a thing, and were never a thing during or
| before my time (before, I can't be 100% certain, but I
| schlepped through the repos and never found examples of
| same).
|
| What generally happens is that you pick a userid (maybe zero
| for arguments sake), and everyone who doesn't match to an FB
| userid gets that number. It didn't make it impossible to
| build an individual profile, but it made it much, much, much
| more difficult and I never saw anyone do it. I left in 2018,
| and would be massively surprised if anyone had built this
| since.
|
| Now, it is entirely possible that not everyone was as
| rigorous as removing userid=0 (for example) and so some FB
| data probably counts them, and they may be in some of the
| clustering models but the notion that they have profiles
| indexed by browser/device id is completely false (for ads at
| least, some of the crap they did for PYMK was insane).
| saos wrote:
| specialist wrote:
| NSA, Facebook, LexisNexus (nee Seisent), others, have uniquely
| identified and track _everyone_ , in near realtime. There need
| not be any bots, sockpuppets, fake accounts.
|
| Alas, fraud is Facebook's biz model. Effectively preventing
| inauthentic activity would reveal the lie. Better the
| bureaucratic kabuki, shielding Facebook (and others) with the
| respectable veneer of plausible denability.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| for multiple reasons, this is not accurate. The actual
| situation is difficult, lets not use words like "everyone"
| "all" "always" for untangling the mess, right?
| specialist wrote:
| For the Americas, since at least mid 2000s, _everyone_ is
| tagged and tracked in near real time. I 'd be surprised
| (shocked) if those systems weren't global today.
|
| How could it be otherwise?
| netsharc wrote:
| Got proof, or "just trust me"?
|
| How do people still disappear, or commit attacks like the
| Boston bombing and the authorities have to go on man hunts
| trying to figure out who they were?
| nebula8804 wrote:
| This event was ~9 years ago. Thats eons in the tech
| industry.
| gzer0 wrote:
| > We have access to individual-level desktop browsing data of a
| representative sample of the U.S. population via the market
| research firm Nielsen. Participants are incentivized to install a
| software that records all web browsing activity and fill in a
| survey of basic demographics, such as gender, employment, age,
| education, and income
|
| This seems to be an inherently flawed collection methodology. The
| users that one would expect to be involved with these "install
| this software, download this app and earn free money!!" schemes
| would also typically be associated with certain activities that
| would not necessarily reflect the overall population.
|
| The experiment groups themselves are flawed, but then again, I
| also cannot think of an ethical/legal way to conduct this kind of
| research.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Selection bias is kind of a HN go-to for dismissing this people
| don't agree with.
|
| Bit something I learned in my college statistics courses is
| that with a large enough sample, self-selection bias stops
| becoming a problem.
|
| It was a long time ago, so I can't explain the math here. But
| from what I remember, you need a surprisingly small sample size
| to actually achieve real representation.
| richdougherty wrote:
| > Bit something I learned in my college statistics courses is
| that with a large enough sample, self-selection bias stops
| becoming a problem.
|
| What you might have learned is that small (random) samples
| might not represent the full population, but as you get
| bigger (random) samples they tend to get closer to the true
| values.
|
| However, if you sample badly, errors will persist even when
| you sample more.
|
| Example - estimating height in a population:
|
| - If I get a perfect random sample of people then I can
| estimate population height really well, even with a smallish
| sample. The estimate gets better the more people I (randomly)
| sample.
|
| - However if there's selection bias in my sampling and I only
| sample women, then no matter how many women I sample I'm
| going to be getting a bad estimate of height across the full
| population, because I'm excluding men who are taller.
|
| Sample size can't overcome selection bias, you need to use
| other techniques to manage it.
| pid-1 wrote:
| The math is called law of large numbers. It might work well,
| badly or not work at all depending on the distribution and
| the sampling methodology.
|
| Statistics as an area is full of gotchas, I never dismiss
| this sort of complain unless I have robust assumptions about
| the distribution being studied.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Who needs a distribution when you have a collection of
| means?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The math is called law of large numbers
|
| That reduces sampling error, not non-sampling error.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Bit something I learned in my college statistics courses is
| that with a large enough sample, self-selection bias stops
| becoming a problem.
|
| That's...not true, until you are so close to the whole
| population that your maximum error from excluding part of the
| population is less than the error that would otherwise be
| introduced by bias.
|
| With larger samples, _sampling_ error of a random sample is
| reduced, but non-sampling error is (with the above caveat)
| not.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| Erm, no, self-selection bias never disappears or even
| attenuates with sample size, the best you can hope for is to
| reweight the sample according to known demographics of your
| target population, which does indeed get a bit easier with
| larger samples.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > Erm, no, self-selection bias never disappears or even
| attenuates with sample size, the best you can hope for is
| to reweight the sample according to known demographics of
| your target population,
|
| Which, to be fair, is literally Neilsen's entire product
| (for TV at least). I mean, I guess that everyone here
| understands selection bias at a deep level, but to think
| that people who sell representative data to big
| corporations (and have done for longer than many of us have
| been alive) don't have a similar level of understanding is
| just weird.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > the best you can hope for is to reweight the sample
| according to known demographics of your target population,
| which does indeed get a bit easier with larger samples.
|
| That doesn't actually deal with self-selection bias if
| self-selection correlates with the feature of interest
| within the demographic groups, which is probably the normal
| case.
| anonu wrote:
| I watched the Zuckerberg Senate hearings back in 2018. Transcript
| here [1].
|
| I remember his answer on whether users are tracked when logged
| off. I mean the answer can really be a very simple Yes. But
| instead we got this evasion (I lightly cleaned up):
|
| WICKER: One other thing: There have been reports that Facebook
| can track a user's Internet browsing activity, even after that
| user has logged off of the Facebook platform. Can you confirm
| whether or not this is true?
|
| ZUCKERBERG: Senator -- I -- I want to make sure I get this
| accurate, so it would probably be better to have my team follow
| up afterwards.
|
| WICKER: You don't know?
|
| ZUCKERBERG: I know that the -- people use cookies on the
| Internet, and that you can probably correlate activity between --
| between sessions.
|
| We do that for a number of reasons, including security, and
| including measuring ads to make sure that the ad experiences are
| the most effective, which, of course, people can opt out of. But
| I want to make sure that I'm precise in my answer, so let me ...
|
| WICKER: When -- well, when you get ...
|
| ZUCKERBERG: ... follow up with you on that.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
| switch/wp/2018/04/10...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| harles wrote:
| The senate hearings are just theater. Important questions like
| this should probably be async - compel the companies to provide
| specific answers on the record.
| colordrops wrote:
| Especially Feinstein grilling him about privacy, when she
| votes for and often even sponsors every privacy invading bill
| and three letter agency out there.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Except for the time she called the out the CIA for reading
| her email.
| colordrops wrote:
| Oh yeah she's all for spying on everyone but herself.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's not _necessarily_ inconsistent to hold the position
| that government should be able to invade privacy in ways
| private corporations should not. As a concrete example,
| search warrants for crimes.
|
| That said, I'm of the opinion Feinstein is largely senile
| at this point, and wish she'd retire.
| colordrops wrote:
| She has supported NSA collection of information on all
| citizens of the US. There is no reasonable argument for
| this and it's not even in the same universe as search
| warrants.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Again, though, "the NSA should be allowed to do this" and
| "Facebook should _not_ be allowed to do this " are not
| inherently contradictory.
|
| I share your opinion that the NSA's surveilance is bad,
| and I'd assert it's unconstitutional, but the
| hypocrisy/contradiction you're trying to highlight still
| isn't necessarily there.
| colordrops wrote:
| We'll have to agree to disagree. I can't square the logic
| that it's unconstitutional for the NSA to do this and
| legal for Facebook and yet somehow it makes sense to
| argue that it's ok for the NSA but not Facebook.
| quinnjh wrote:
| Would you rather have all of your activity information
| utilized against you for national security or for the
| private profit of one corporation?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm a bit baffled as to why not.
|
| The government can kill me; Facebook cannot. The
| government can imprison me; Facebook cannot. The
| government can require I pay taxes; Facebook can not.
|
| It shouldn't be surprising when similar disparities exist
| on surveillance. The NSA's program has yet to be deemed
| unconstitutional by the courts, which is what matters.
| colordrops wrote:
| Ok I get you on that front, the government has a monopoly
| on violence, might makes right, yes. I mistakenly thought
| you were trying to argue that somehow it legally or
| moralistically made sense.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Absolutely. Zuck is the ideal subject, as of you asked him if
| the sun came up this morning the answer would sound evasive.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Ha, that is so funny Mr. Zucker! "the ad experiences are the
| most effective" -- Yes, effective for whom? Surely not the
| users, because their "ad experience" (even that expression in
| itself already makes me gag, omg, must be out of some marketing
| horror movie or something) is surely most effective, when ads
| do not show up at all. Ads are annoying, manipulating, and
| getting in the way of productivity. Surely Zucky did not mean
| to track users to get rid of those pesky ads, which are shown
| without actual consent.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I've seen several ads in my life that directed me to things I
| was legitimately interested in. Certainly a hell of a lot
| more online than on TV.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Yes, people tend to have different experiences in life. Ads
| to me are extremely disruptive, I cannot focus and read
| text when there are moving images and flashing colors
| surrounding it. I consider it an affront to accessibility
| for the attention-challenged, they are designed to distract
| and derail my train of thought, shouting "forget what you
| came here for and look this way"
| shadowgovt wrote:
| As an accessibility issue, I'd recommend modifying your
| user-agent with ad-blockers, etc. A11y is something every
| site should support, but expecting the world to bend
| everyone's experience around particular accessibility
| needs is likely to leave one disappointed.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Of course I do what I can to adapt things on my end, but
| I will also publically complain that the "ad experience"
| is not a benevolent one.
| titzer wrote:
| That is not a good tradeoff for a massive surveillance
| state that pesters and obsesses over users, profiling them
| to a degree literally unimaginable in the time of Orwell.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I don't find the surveillance to be intrusive, so it's
| acceptable.
|
| There are already several companies that build a credit
| history out of every major transaction I do. There's at
| least two companies that have parts of a full credit card
| transaction history on me. Almost every store I walk into
| has security cameras monitoring me. The level of
| surveillance I'm already living under is so high that if
| I had anxiety about that sort of thing I'd have run for
| the hills when I turned 21.
|
| The ad surveillance networks are impressive in scope, but
| about on-par with their peers in finance.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| > I don't find the surveillance to be intrusive, so it's
| acceptable.
|
| Interesting opinion for somebody with nick called
| 'shadowgovt'. I get your point, but even as that its
| shouldn't be OK in any meaningful way. It can easily end
| up as a slippery slope that is extremely hard if not
| impossible to come back from, and the intrusion to ones
| privacy goes deeper and deeper till you have absolutely
| 0.
|
| Nobody alive in this world has absolutely nothing to
| hide. Maybe ass warts or shape of sub-par penis, some
| rather unusual preferences or opinions on XYZ, body odor
| when sweating or locations of body hair, whatever.
|
| We shouldn't have OK categories for intrusions to our
| most private parts of our lives, period. Terrorists, ad
| optimization, blahblah whatever, just nope. At least
| disabled by default and if one is brave enough just go
| ahead and enable it to get that 5$ discount. I feel very
| strongly that I don't want my children to live in a world
| like that, how can we fuckup with such a basic and
| important item.
| titzer wrote:
| It's such a broad cop out. Very much like the "we use
| (horribly intrusive surveillance technology that is complete
| overkill for any imaginable purpose _today_ , is almost
| certainly illegal to collect without explicit consent, but we
| may find useful in 5 years when we trawl all the logs and
| mine it for a tiny modicum of profitable edge) to improve our
| products and services, and some other random long sentences
| that sound innocuous and something else, look at the fluffy
| bunny, (huge) * _CONTINUE*_ button, pre-selected (tiny) not
| right now, doesn 't even look like a button".
|
| Improving the ad experience could mean they stick a probe up
| your rectum and see if your bowels move better or not, for
| all they care.
| annadane wrote:
| When you consider that Zuckerberg lies all the time about
| everything, it makes sense
| robbedpeter wrote:
| I think he doesn't lie, he just has a severely warped view of
| reality, and an incredibly inflated sense of his own
| capabilities. He won a lottery and thinks it was intentional.
|
| His public blabber on ai and automation are a great peek
| inside his mind.
|
| The mindset is "That problem isn't solved because I haven't
| worked on it yet." There's no self awareness or humility
| involved, and he can afford the apparatus to maintain that
| for the rest of his life.
| sarajevo wrote:
| This is solid reasoning here. On the "lottery" side,
| imagine if he went to college (where he scraped student
| profiles) a couple of years before or after, his timing
| would be completely off and there would be no Facebook.
| annadane wrote:
| He won a lottery from stealing other people's ideas
| colordrops wrote:
| He's not even close to this naive. He's a sociopath, as
| evidenced by even his earliest statements calling his users
| idiots for trusting him. I worked closely with Facebook
| around 2011 and everyone I encountered knew exactly what
| they were doing and that it was fucked up.
|
| It's very difficult for those with ethical and moral
| standards to grasp that there are truly nasty people out
| there.
| titzer wrote:
| Both things can be true. He can be a sociopath who knows
| what he is doing and naive true believer of his own
| abilities in alternating time slices. Most crazy people
| are several contradictory varieties of insane all at
| once.
| colordrops wrote:
| What reason to you have to believe that he is anything
| but a selfish liar only out for himself?
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Being tracked when logged off/on other sites is a bit different
| than shadow profiles.
|
| Users are absolutely tracked when logged off or on other sites
| through 3rd party cookies, aka the Facebook Pixel. If you go on
| a news site that has the Facebook Pixel, it will record that
| you went on their site. When you go back on FB, they will check
| that FB Pixel cookie and see what other sites with that same
| cookie you've visited. Through that, they can compile a profile
| of what interests to use to advertise to you.
|
| Shadow profiles are a bit of a different story, since that
| would essentially be FB compiling a profile of someone that has
| gone to all these sites with FB Pixel, but doesn't have a FB
| account. That's entirely possible, and would make it so that if
| you do eventually make an account with a FB-owned product,
| they've already got all of that info on you to start targeting
| ads.
|
| The most low hanging fruit and directly impactful way to
| prevent this as a user:
|
| 1. Use a browser or browser extension that blocks 3rd party
| cookies
|
| 2. Use an email alias service like Firefox relay. This allows
| you to generate a random email address for every site you make
| an account on, and all those email addresses forward emails to
| your actual email.
|
| Using the same email everywhere is essentially the same as what
| FB Pixel does, it allows all these sites to share with data
| brokers that bob@gmail.com has made accounts at these other
| websites.
|
| 3. This is a bit harder/not as cheap to do, but the same
| applies for using the same phone number when signing up to
| sites, it allows data brokers/ad networks to connect accounts
| across dif sites to the same person. If it's not required,
| don't provide a phone number.
|
| If it is required and the number will be used to send important
| info, try to use a disposable phone number service that
| forwards to your personal phone number. If it's required but
| the number won't be used for important communication, use a
| fake number like 123-456-7890
| anonu wrote:
| > Being tracked when logged off/on other sites is a bit
| different than shadow profiles.
|
| It all tastes like chicken. The tracking mechanisms are
| identical. You are probably given some "Ad ID". And that Ad
| ID correlates with your facebook ID if you have a facebook
| account.
|
| Calling it a "shadow profile" sounds sinister. But its just
| commonplace tactics that any ad network is going to deploy.
| Facebook just happens to have more information on you than
| others.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 100% agree with strategy #3, except I'm finding it harder to
| implement:
|
| 1. Everybody wants your phone number these days, especially
| those you don't want to give it to. From whatsapp and signal
| that use it as your main identify, whether you want to or
| not; to social sites like Facebook or Twitter that MAY let
| you sign up without phone, but "flag" you for security on
| first login and require phone; to other sites whether gmail
| or otherwise that require phone to sign in
|
| 2. More and more of them these days send a text to phone to
| verify it belongs to you
|
| I'm therefore finding it harder and harder to not give my
| phone to everybody (of course, "not using the product" is
| always a possibility, so I still don't have a twitter account
| and by all accounts my life is better for it :)
| KoftaBob wrote:
| For sure, though at the very least the examples you gave
| are mostly other social networks. So at worst, it allows
| them to know what other social networks you use.
|
| What you want to avoid is using your phone number when
| doing things like online shopping, since that's when more
| personal details about you can be connected to your number,
| and therefore to the other social networks you used that
| number with.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| link to pdf https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp9571.pdf
| sebow wrote:
| Rhetorical question ahead: Wasn't this a conspiracy theory?What
| happened?
|
| Well, short memory/attention span or straight out ignorance of
| the masses happened.When those ideas first circulated mainly by
| affected users noticing such practices(shadow-banning for
| example), those were the first to be burned at the stake.Then
| whistle blowers came and dropped some well intentioned crumbs
| first amongst circles of "techies", mainly anonymously.(it was
| much later on when 'actual proof' was given to the media outlets
| -- out of which the vast majority disregarded them --) Did not
| matter in the grand scheme though: employees were fired, media
| articles did damage control(>for< the company, most often than
| not; because a Company doing the damage control is partially
| admitting a degree of truth to the claim), and let's also mention
| the 'useful idiots' who believed the authoritative voices because
| 'history is written by the victors': which is now mostly a cyclic
| numbers game of how well one controls a narrative in the social
| network(/any other information channel).Considering the attacked
| entity is the social media platform itself, the discourse medium
| was inevitable advantageous and easily skewed for the platform to
| defend itself.The more principled either staid in the mud,
| fighting skeptics of the rumors, or moved platforms towards less
| censorious and/or anonymous places.Truth ultimately did not
| matter, the platform did the required divide & conquer to shift
| the attention.
|
| It's really miniaturized politics, except it's actually worse:
| there's no democracy(well unless you're talking board of
| directors and such, but that almost never happens: such optics
| tank your stock).To quote the hypocritical statement of people
| who like authoritative voices and also 'like the free
| markets'[which by the way ideologically speaking is a
| contradiction, unlike you're by definition a fascist; Granted
| here we've substituted the authority from the state to the
| company itself]: "They're a private company, they can do whatever
| they want."; At the end of the day FB is already ~dead, and Zuck
| knows this.Some people (users who know the skeletons in the
| closet, the company, entities that use it to push their
| narratives) probably will continue to ride it out as long as the
| naivety of the vast majority continues.
| CSSer wrote:
| > Google... has shifted to using its Chrome browser to track
| online activities.
|
| I really wish they were more specific about some of these claims.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The whole thing is wall-to-wall innuendo. There's no hard facts
| in here anywhere.
| mhardcastle wrote:
| I've always wondered how this works with CCPA. I attempted to
| exercise my right to data deletion and was directed to log in. Do
| those with shadow accounts not have the right to have their data
| deleted?
| jedberg wrote:
| Technically that isn't your data it's their data (or your
| friend's data).
|
| It's definitely a gray area.
| john-doe wrote:
| HTML:
| https://papertohtml.org/paper?id=bc062760a8938d7e4bec9aedfd4...
| civilized wrote:
| FB should fix the dozen or so shadow profiles of everyone's
| grandma that have been cropping up for several years now.
| kritiko wrote:
| I would be interested to know how the claim here that 50% of all
| sites are tracked by Facebook compares to Google's profiling
| across the web...
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Without looking up any sources, I would say that Google is even
| more pervasive. I would estimate around 80-90% of the websites
| include some kind of Google tracking.
| agmater wrote:
| Are you counting Google Analytics as tracking as well?
| u2077 wrote:
| I have been using DDG on mobile for about a few years. It
| shows you the most blocked trackers and google is by far the
| worst. Google trackers were found on 31% of websites I visit
| whereas Facebook trackers are at 4%. My results may be skewed
| because I never visit or view any content on Facebook, but I
| do the occasional google search when I can't find something.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Only 31%? Are you sure? I mean, I block all Google domains,
| including fonts and stuff, but 31% seems low. Does that
| count things like fonts from Google domains and other
| things that could be used to track users? It feels like
| whenever I check my ad blocker's block settings for a page,
| I see Google stuff.
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