So whens Boing Boing deleting their page?
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Wait, what?
Hmm.
First they would have to get your email address. I don’t think they’d buy some spammer’s list. Perhaps they fast-talked a member who knows you into sending an invite? Aha!, or they conned someone into handing over their whole contact list from Google, Yahoo! or similar. (LinkedIn tries that.)
Then they would have to tie your computer to the email address. Perhaps a link in the email with an ID tag in the URL? If you clicked on a tagged link even once, then they’d load up your browser with the cookies to id you at every site you visited with a Facebook tracker icon.
After that, they sit back and accumulate a profile. (And that’s why I block any fetches from Facebook at the router.)
I’d say that Cambridge Analytica stole chump change compared to what Facebook really has on everyone.
I find it highly remarkable that a crew like BoingBoing, speaking so often on privacy matters and taking stand on such topics, themselves have FOUR tracking/x-domain cookies and EIGHTEEN privacy warnings from uBlock Origin. Pot kettle?
I think that Adblock Plus can also keep those ‘social media’ trackers out… Maybe yet another reason to use that nice browser extension.
Your subsequent analysis is exactly what I assume they’ve done. I do understand that they have “holes” for everybody from whom they have a reference, but no actual account. It’s fairly easy for someone to assemble my name, email address, postal address, schooling, and job, and from that have a pretty decent idea of when someone is making a reference to me.
I assume they nabbed a posting of someone asking for a “tlwest” who went to school “x” at time “y”, associated it with their “me” hole in their system and sent the email.
It’s one of a few times in my life that I really felt the power of the Internet.
One of the other times was when I looked at the data about me that Google kindly lets me browse, and noticed that it had a better history of my browsing than my browser did. Pretty much every web site passes on my identity to Google, most to Facebook, and probably a good half dozen other entities. In exchange for what, I don’t know.
Of course. I do remember a reporter asked for all the data that Facebook has on her. It took months and a lot of prodding, and got back a printed package containing nearly 300 pages of data (this from memory, I could be mis-remembering).
You might be thinking of this story about Tinder (which requires FB to join):
Oops. Very likely.
On a similar note, I may have way underestimated in my “half-dozen” other sites. Perhaps closer to 100.
This from someone analyzing who the NYT informs about your reading habits.
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I deleted my account in 2009.
I reactivated it in 2014 because of mobile game gifts. My profile came back up as if I was never gone after a single email.
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Hasn’t changed much since I deleted my account 6 or 8 years ago. After the clear everything went through my sister in law complained (the real one not the Facebook version), and I explained that I never did anything on Facebook except post a Xmas photo of my son for her (her nephew). Despite me promising to send her pics via email she was sort of overwrought so I made a new account with no information, set all Facebook emails as trash and sent a friend request to my sister in law.
So another problem with deleting is that you may have crazy relatives who will induce you to do crazy stuff.
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You might find Facebook more useful if you used it more.
Thank you for this insight, Facebook!
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