We need a Carrington event so we can start over.
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I’m sure that the lawyers coached him to make no inferences and only respond to terms defined exactly. Leaving him wiggle room by not defining shadow profile was such a mistake that I wonder if it was deliberate?
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I just checked, and you’re right. I don’t have a fecebook account, never have, but I did have fecebook cookies on my machine.
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Yup. And they allow tracking you on any site that shows a Facebook icon fetched from facebook.com.
I don’t have any, but that’s because I block facebook.com at the router.
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Facebook tracking is added to many sites for people to track facebook ad campaigns, if you visit those sites your browser grabs those resources from facebook in the background silently. they have a tracking pixel that sets a cookie that is on a ton of sites. anywhere their ads, widgets, like buttons, share buttons, or anything else embed also get the same. If you’ve been online i’d be surprised if didn’t cross facebook many times a day without even realizing.
Facebook is everywhere, embedded in apps as easy sign in, cameras that have instant share, it really is endless. Their social media site is just the part of the iceberg that is above water. it is even baked into macos.
The IoT has made this even worse. I’m pretty sure my fridge is on Facebook and has more “friends” then i do…
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So not separating sales from marketing and making a foundation to end disease [points at dissent of the moment to not runninan immune systems, via Luraletter or something,] with a particular S.O. isn’t that? And the NPR SMEs weren’t speaking out the side of their mouths on purpose? It was plain to me.
[This is where my own machine comma shames me by inserting comas at me. Please let be be completely alone in this.]
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Humbly suggest…
Alternatively, if for some reason you want to enable them, browsers have the functionality to wipe your cookies as desired. On PC the shortcut is control+shift+delete and on Mac it’s shift+command+delete. That will give you the option to wipe out cookies, but what it really does is wipe out session cookies.
Purging the persistent cookies (AKA supercookies) is a little more work. For Safari, you’ll need to go to the Advanced menu and enable the Develop menu. You do this at your own risk as you can easily delete all your browser’s offline information. On PC browsers, you’ll need to delete them manually from then various folders they like to hide in (especially Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight folders if you have those installed). Better yet, don’t install Flash. It’s the Devil’s plaything and quickly blessedly becoming an anachronism.
For smartphones and tablets, a lot of brand names have persistent cookies baked into the OS implementation, and they’ll just respawn unless you root the phone. For most people this isn’t worth the risk unless they know what they’re doing. If you decide to root your phone, make sure you do your homework and probably try on a old phone you won’t be crushed if you accidentally brick it.
My single strongest advice on PC and Mac is to use Firefox. It’s more user-oriented when it comes to protecting your privacy. And of course everyone should start using a VPN, especially these days.
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There are ways of dealing with cookies.
Granted, it is an arms race, and you can’t be 100% sure all the time.
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I do use Firefox. I also use the browser add-on “Cookie AutoDelete”. I periodically clear all stored Site Data, and I periodically remove all cookies. I have Firefox Tracking Protection set to Always (with only a couple of allowed exceptions for sites that won’t work right without it). Yet, the cookie eventually returns…
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This is exactly it and what I was going to explain. It’s not a “shadow profile” like a dossier. The information is in the form of tracking who visits FB-affiliated sites via the tracking pixel. Why, THIS VERY PAGE… has a Quantcast tracking pixel, and the Boingboing main site has a few: Google, Quantcast and… gasp a FACEBOOK TRACKING PIXEL OH MY GOD CALL THE FBI!
> <!-- Facebook Pixel Code -->
> <script>!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,'script','https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js');fbq('init', '1174428159312267');fbq('track', 'PageView');</script>
> <noscript><img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=1174428159312267&ev=PageView&noscript=1" /></noscript>
> <!-- DO NOT MODIFY -->
> <!-- End Facebook Pixel Code -->
It’s really not as big a deal as people are making it out to be. This is standard web tech in 2018.
Although… it would be nice to have a general opt-out button on browsers to disable tracking cookies and tracking pixels on all visited websites. Sure, we can achieve this by various means in browser settings, etc, but a big obvious button even easier to invoke than Adblock Plus, would be a HUGE step.
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Not that it makes it OK but isn’t this the same as what hundreds of other companies do too? Maybe FB can collect more information but they’re not alone. Take a look at these sites to see who else is tracking you:
http://www.youronlinechoices.eu/
http://optout.networkadvertising.org/
Facebook is on the list (for me) and apparently you can opt-out so I guess that’s what Zuckerberg’s talking about.
Presumably it’s done with cookies though so if you then clear your cookies you’ll have lost the ‘opt-out’ status.
If someone who knows more about these things can correct me on anything, please do.
Thanks for the explanation. I was simply intrigued that I haven’t had a facebook account for over 5-6 yrs, yet I keep finding facebook, skype, snapchat, and other sites putting cookies on my machine without me ever visiting their sites. I know privacy is dead as soon as you go online, just don’t like people (sites) following me.
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Just so people are aware, despite all the anti FB rhetoric, Boing Boing is very happy to collect pixel data from anyone who visits their site.
Not saying there’s anything wrong with this. Just an observation that Facebook pixels are pretty much obligatory these days on any site that has monetisation.
G[quote=“WhyBother, post:8, topic:118905”]
Shadow profiles is a recent name people outside Facebook give to the practice. They probably have some cute, internal name they’ve been using within Facebook for a decade, like “impressions” or “fingerprints”
[/quote]
Or “dumb fucks”. Or is that term of art used at fb exclusively to describe users who have willing shared their data?
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Yes, since you are the millionth person to mention it, we know they’re still on FB.
but welcome to boing boing.
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