this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
2716 points (98.2% liked)

Technology

59598 readers
3427 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Yikes.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Why does Zuck want to know the browser histories of people on the internet? 😳

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why would he need to know Health & Fitness?? Anything related to Facebook/Meta is pure trash.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So he can sell your data to advertisers. Yeah, don’t use anything made by Meta that is connected to the internet.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Worse, they gatekeep your data and only sell your attention to advertisers. That way no one has all the data but them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, the data is used to create profiles of you to serve more relevant ads, so that advertisers pay them more. Thats more accurate once I think about it a little.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I want a semi-decent VR headset so bad, but I don’t want to put six or seven cameras made by Facebook into my house.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I mean they already have a bunch of it. You know those social media buttons that could be embedded on a website. Their purpose wasn't to like or share. It was to track you by phoning home.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep, thats true.

I do use a VPN and browse via incognito/Firefox though, so my chances of being tracked are pretty low.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Tracking people, in the minds of those doing it, has very little to do with someone's geographical location or which ISP they're using (and in the U.S. they know that anyway even if you use a VPN because each wireless provider throws enough fingerprints onto each model of phone to give out that info with minimal permissions).

They're not tracking you so they can see which path you take to get from your living room to the ice cream shop and back, they're tracking you so they know what you're doing online and in whatever rooms you're in, regardless of where they are.

The microphones listen and record just enough data that they can tell what shows you're watching, etc, without blowing absolutely all of your bandwidth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-device_tracking?useskin=vector

Whether you're on a VPN or using Incognito mode, any site you visit that does any amount of cookie use, visit tracking, session state management, etc, gets data about someone that they can then compare to their existing datasets and then potentially match up with previous data about you.

The absolute proliferation of javascript on the web almost guarantees that every single time you load a webpage, something, somewhere, is loading nigh-invisibly locally on your device that's feeding one kind of information or another back to a webserver about your current browsing experience on the tab you're in right that instant. This is in stark contrast to decades ago where server-side code which renders everything on the back end and delivers it as mostly HTML to your browser was the primary way to handle things. (because as indicated by the fact that many pages take a while to load, javascript is limited by the local processing power of YOUR device. Not theirs.)

Try and browse the web with NoScript or something like it loaded and you'll see what I mean pretty quickly.

VPNs and Incognito mode have their uses, but they are not doing much to stop you from being tracked in the manner that these things are designed to "track" you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's like, the biggest goldmine ever, and right now Google has all of it.