This is wholly anecdotal, but I think there is a generational gap somewhere around 1990 that makes this essentially a non-issue going forward. I think being uncomfortable with being spied on (whether it’s by the government or Facebook or whoever) is not something that younger people care about at all as a broad principle–it’s just accepted like the sun rising in the east.
If you tell a 23 year old today that Snapchat and Tinder are looking at all the pictures and messages they send on the platforms and sharing them with both the NSA as part of a counter-terrorism operation and Monster Energy Drink for a marketing campaign, I think an oh well so what shrug would be about as much umbrage as would be mustered on average.
It’s a conduit, but not the most insidious one. The majority of data comes through the facebook connect tracker, these are on at least 90% of the web and don’t care at all if you’re logged into facebook at the time or in fact even have an account. They track everyone, all the time.
I blocked the domain in my router settings, it’s great. No facebook through my wifi at least.
Sort of. I remember how this “integration” worked. If you gave Netflix or Spotify access to Facebook (and you did have to opt in) and a movie/tv show/music was mentioned in a private message, it would add a link to that content on those services. So I imagine what was happening is that messages were being bounced through those partners to add links. That stopped around the same time Facebook stopped mining PMs for targeted advertising.
It wasn’t mass surveillance of everyone’s messages.
The private message stuff seems kind of… unbelievable? I mean, it’s believable; it’s Facebook.
I’m sure it’s technically true, but it just seems so utterly stupid that I can’t blindly accept they’d simply give someone unrestricted access to dick around with private messages.
Are we absolutely sure it wasn’t some API that allowed people to log in using their Facebook account and then send/receive messages without leaving the app?
I believe this is largely because, in the transition from a DVD service to a streaming service, Netflix abandoned the long tail. They have relatively little to recommend, so everyone gets approximately the same recommendations.
I realized they were doing this a few years ago. I had posted a link on Tumblr of a Spotify metal playlist I had made, and tagged it as #my_misspent_youth. I had also sent a FB message to a friend of mine of a pic of me walking my chihuahua by the beach. Then, one day I’m back at the beach walking my chihuahua again and a Spotify ad comes on and says “You’re walking your chihuahua by the beach, thinking of your misspent youth. Shouldn’t you sign up for Spotify Premium?” I had a brief panic attack because I knew it was all familiar but couldn’t remember where (the posts were done a year before), and then realized what they had done. My facebook is gone, and I’m now user [random bunch of numbers] on Spotify.
