The Truth About Facebook: How Communication Became Synonymous With Surveillance

The Truth About Facebook: How Communication Became Synonymous With Surveillance.

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Reference:
“Facebook’s power is to sort what people see and to screen information. That’s basically what Google does, too”.

-- Tom

 

I still need to read it, but my mother was complaining to me that whenever she searches for certain products on Google, she sometimes gets emails with offers from companies about the exact same stuff she searched for. So I wonder, how is this possible with Ghostery installed?

The only thing I can think of is Facebook, since she also uses her email address as FB username. So FB is somehow monitoring my mother, and is selling data (and email addresses) to other companies, that's a breach of privacy if you ask me.

 

Rasheed if it was me, I'd promptly get her to: 1/ change her email address, 2/ change her facebook name or better still 3/ get rid of FB all together. Everyone with even a basic view of keeping their privacy intact should know that FB is nothing other than a glorified honeypot spy outfit. Finally I'd tell her, NEVER use your email address as an open-free-for-all-to-see username.

 

Is it a Gmail account?

 

It's cause Google. Get her to switch to https://duckduckgo.com/ & https://www.startpage.com/
If she has a gmail, or any other Google+ account, she'd have to disable a few settings: https://encrypted.google.com/settings/ads/onweb

 

I've become very fond of Disconnect Search
https://disconnect.me/search

 

This surveillance can be easily avoided in Chrome with uBlock (Dynamic Filtering) and/or uMatrix and in Firefox with uBlock and/or Policeman. No big deal for users who know how - but unfortunately for the 99% all others.

 

I guess she's logging on Google account while browsing and her account setting is not good (there're quite many settings she should change). But even if not, still there can be many possibilities. Ofc search engine is one, as Veeshush pointed out, tho I don't know how much 3rd party can utilize search tracking. I found only Disconnect Search can be reliable replacement to Google search (tho still not perfect due to localization, even after I changed to my locale), so change her search to it, or at least use Google Privacy addon which removes search redirect tracking where Ghostery doesn't help. Don't expect too much on Ghostery, it's basically just cookie and beacon blocker, too powerless against various privacy threats if used alone. Also Reality's advice is very right, and I want to add one: if she still want to use FB, then do not browse web pages while logging on. Although FB tracks even log-offed user, if you're logging in there's many more problems including privacy and security. Always logging off when she doesn't need, or use another browser if she want to keep logging in.

 

Not suggesting this for the less experienced, but you can achieve many useful things by using a wipe-on-exit dedicated browser sandbox using Sandboxie in Windows or Firejail in Linux. Obviously follow the above advice not to deviate from using the browser instance for that purpose only, not for search or for other sites.

 

Well, it really depends on how you're browser is configured: If you blacklist Facebook in the global scope of uMatrix and only allow what's needed to make it work in its domain-specific scope, I don't think that Facebook is able to track you even if you're logged in as all network requests to Facebook are blocked when you surf any other sites.

 

Or on firefox, you can use Priv8 sandbox separation.
But IF a website conduct browser exploit...it's another story tho quite unlikely.

 

I just added Disconnect Search (Private) to my list of search engines in Firefox (from the MyCroft Project website).

-- Tom

 

Isn't tracking on Google blocked by Ghostery?

No it's from Yahoo Mail.

Yes, I don't expect Ghostery to block all privacy related threats, but I just found this story to be weird. I believe it's FB which is tracking her, but I don't know for sure.

 

Thanks, but to stop using FB is currently not an option. I will try to change the user-name. But yes, FB is really bad for privacy.

 

As mentioned above it's easy to avoid tracking by FB. Even if you don't want to use uMatrix (I still don't understand why ) you can use uBlock's Dynamic Filtering. Just create a block rule for FB in the second (global) column and a noop rule in the third (local) column - and all is well. And blocking 3rd party cookies and website data in the browser settings is a must anyhow.

And again, for Firefox there is uBlock, too, and RequestPolicy and Policeman.

Quite frankly, I don't understand this discussion at all. For Wilders members (who are usually supposed to be well-informed about security and privacy matters) this should really be a non-issue.

 

Like I said, it's my mother who is having this problem. She is using Firefox with Ghostery installed. And she has never handed out her email address to the companies she is receiving mails from. Only Facebook knows her mail address, and Google should not know it. So the question is, how is she being tracked.

 

So Ghostery isn't doing a great job then, it should block "Facebook Connect".

Yes I agree.

 

That's certainly true. But my point was that even if you use it being tracked by it all over the internet can be easily avoided - if you know how.

 

I don't recall seeing conditions when I joined Wilders that I had to have a certain amount of knowledge and nor do I remember seeing your name next to any rules stating what is supposed to be or not. Everybody has to start somewhere and there's no shame starting at the bottom. I'm here to learn and I still have a long way to go.

 

I can't agree more

 

too late now... even if you opt-out of facebook entirely, they probably already have enough personal data to track you anywhere else... all you could do now is delete your account and email you used to register, stop using google, instead use something like startpage.com or something similar, and be a paranoid geek like anyone else here in wilder...