> Users with a Facebook account can opt-out of the ad scheme by adjusting their settings, while non-Facebook members can opt-out through the Digital Advertising Alliance in the US, the Digital Advertising Alliance in Canada, and the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance in Europe.
...or by using a wide-spectrum blocker like uBlock Origin,
and for the cookie warning problem there is a solution too: "EU: Prebake - Filter Obtrusive Cookie Notices"[1]
I enjoy using NoScript but I found I could not recommend it to non-techie friends, as it requires a lot of manual input to not break webpages. Is Privacy Badger more user friendly?
I don't believe privacy badger has broken any sites for me, I just run it in the background and let it do its thing, but it will of course be less effective than noscript because it doesn't break sites, and often the domains you want to block will break the site.
With Privacy Badger, there were a few months not too far back ago, where on certain sites (e.g., sports blogs) when browsing in private mode (Firefox), the first time I would visit a site, it would work. Then every subsequent time it would not work (broken layout). My (unproven) conclusion was the first time, it hadn't decided the (JS? cookies?) were tracking me, but after that it decided it had. I haven't had this problem in the last few months, though.
it _is_ more user friendly but not as powerful as NoScript. I totally feel the same way about telling non-techie friends since they just "allow all temporarily" once they see the site is broken....
What's really fucked up, is that I am on my windows pc now, and I typed 'https://fb.scanandcleanlocal.com/' into my browser and it _worked_. It resolved to 127.0.0.1:443 and it just shows a blank page. My computer must have a virus.
It did years ago :) When i didn't had account they already know my name, mail, telephone number, because some idiots gave them their mails login & passwords, allowing FB to read all contacts.
I wasn't on Facebook, yet in the "hey, join FB" message they listed 6 of "people I know that are already of Facebook".
So imagine how much data they got about me:
1) No account on FB
2) But FB tracked me with their cookies on almost every page, because almost every page has some FB widget (fanpage box, like buttons etc)
3) They know "some-random-guy-9348239849" likes to browse pages A, B, C, D, which means he likes AA, AB, BA, BB, BC, CA, DA activities
4) Then people start giving away "their" data about me. A lot of them did, so FB could connect who I know, and their connections with each other.
5) So FB got "my-name-PERSONAL_DATA", not associated with the data from point 3.
6) I got that message
7) If I'd click the welcoming link, then I wouldn't even need to register - FB then could connect that "some-random-guy" data with "my-name" data.
This probably goes even deeper, but we just don't know that.
Facebook with that message told me way too much about how much they know about unregistered users, I bet they don't do this anymore :)
Yep, what you're describing is what I believe is called "Shadow Profiles", and they've been unapologetically doing it for years. Very likely, even if you have all the privacy extensions and jsblockers installed on your computer, or even if you go full RMS and only wget once a day to get your daily content and email, odds are Facebook has a full profile on you because of the people in your life who leak the information about you.
Your folks filling out a form on Facebook saying that they have X children, your friends sharing their contact list with LinkedIn/Google/Facebook and you're on it, your workplace profile being crawled, and so on. Unless you go full on hermit, there's really no way to not be part of Facebook either actively as a user or passively as a shadow profile.
Exfiltrating this data, or even so much as seeing the entirety of it also appears to not be possible to see what bits of your information have been gathered, to know who has access to it, to know what it's being used for, or even to deny them the ability to make profit on this information. It's incredibly frustrating, as if any individual citizen were to do this sort of reconnaissance and data gathering on another citizen, it'd be called stalking, and people would have legal means to redress. But the fact that even those who have not agreed to the Facebook TOS are still profiled and sold and used for profit without the aforementioned persons' consent seems very wrong.
This also happened to me with Twitter.
Had to use it for an experiment, used random data but they needed my phone number for verification.
I used an old sim card I still had lying around and suddenly as suggestion all my high school friends popped up as suggestion. The only thing they needed to know was my number to figure out my entire social network because of my friends sharing their digital address book.
Surprised they weren't doing that already. Facebook has javascript injected on a lot of sites, always assumed that they'd collect a shit ton of data whether you are a user or not.
Also, all ad blockers block google analytics like tracking services but social plugins are generally opt in. I guess they should be blocked by default too.
I assume they've been tracking through Like buttons (clicked or not) for a few years, and now they've collected enough data to know how best to monetize it.
Indeed, even though they've claimed for years that the Like button tracking was "just a bug" (twice). In the Belgium lawsuit they're claiming it's for security. Facebook is hilarious (-ly evil).
We're going to need strong tracking protection in browsers by default, and very soon. If Mozilla won't do it (you can enable it in History settings, though), probably Brave, or some upstart browsers will. Same goes for uBlock and other extensions.
You are assuming they broke the european legislation for "a few years"?
It's more likely they had lower hanging fruits to work on before starting this kind of tracking.
> You are assuming they broke the european legislation for "a few years"?
Not parent. I am not particularly famiiar with that legislation, but if it says that allowing websites to use your API and embed links to your site and profiting from the data in some way is illegal.
Just to add to the others comments, get NoScript and you can control exactly who gets to run Javascript at all times. It makes the internet so much safer and you will be blown away at how many domains some sites are trying to run scripts from.
Gotta 2nd NoScript for blocking all detritus from wasting my data caps & cpu cycles, although the default white-list needs much purging out of the box.
For added goodness, I also run the Blender Add-On[1] for the sites I do allow on occasion. I value my privacy <b>MORE</b> than the marketeers do.
uMatrix (from gorhill=Raymond Hill, of uBlock Origin fame) is extremely useful. I haven't used NoScript in 5 years or so, so things might have changed - but compared to what I remember, uMatrix is no less capable (in fact, more capable), and much easier to use -- though sadly, still not at a level that a non-techie will use.
Noscript is harmful, the dev sold out and showed Spyware ads on its own noscript website! Noscript didn't block it btw. Change user agent to Windows and visit the site, see uf it's still up. You can't trust noscript.
You are stealing from the websites and content creators who needs to track and exploit your personal information to provide the internet as we know it today. /s
I'm running uBlock + uMatrix. Very clean browsing experience. Also quite bare-bones before adding site specific rules, which probably won't suit everyone :)
Isn't that overkill? EFF Privacy Badger states that it's a one-extension solution rather than having ghostery, adblock + others: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger (2nd FAQ)
I've never tried Privacy Badger myself, what's your reasoning for having both? Is it not quite as all-encompassing as it claims?
It's an anti-tracking extension, not an adblocker. uBlock Origin lets you sign up to custom lists and make custom rules which can include cosmetic filters. These are helpful for removing things from view even if they get loaded by your browser, which is darn convenient even though it's useless for preventing tracking.
With fingerprinting, what's the point of all this?
Browsers and Internet commections now have enough discoverable stuff via HTTP and JS to identify users uniquely enough that in 99% of cases the user's session can really get a unique id! Across publishers! Without third party cookies!!
That's great, but once you factor in all the people who downloaded this plugin and are otherwise slightly harder to fingerprint, it's still 99% accurate!
I was saying the number of people who install a plugin that varies the user agent is tiny, and even then there are other ways to detect (just check out the lists of things, screen sizes etc.)
And the big picture is, regardless of these small imperfections, a digital fingerprint is over 95% accurate! So that's very valuable!
uBlock Origin (rule in Peter Lowe’s Ad server list) does, as does Steven Black's hosts file[1] (probably due to pulling from Peter Lowe's list).
I use the latter for network-level blocking (dnsmasq on a DD-WRT router; forced DNS redirection), and it works surprisingly well - even the ads on my Xbox One dashboard are blocked.
uMatrix blocks all those things by default. At least 50% of sites I go to have facebook and twitter embeds. If a site doesn't load properly with cross site links blocked, most of the time I won't bother with it.
This is really a big thing since it directly affects the Google cash cow(Adwords/Doubleclick). Facebook has all the data in the world about a user(location, personal details, current mood) which google lacks and so they can target users on the rest of the internet in a better way.
Google has internet searches. As well as often locations and journeys (Maps; Android). What a user watches (YouTube). Their emails (Gmail). What they do online (Analytics).
Facebook knows personal details, mood, etc for people who explicitly choose to share these things with their friends, or participate on Facebook in other ways. This may be an oversimplification, but I suspect Google is able to learn much more about a user passively than Facebook is.
Of course it'll differ for different people, but on balance I'd say Google knows _a lot more_ about me than Facebook does.
(...And they probably both know more about me than I do.)
So yes, this news may affect Google, but I disagree that Facebook has an advantage over Google when it comes to knowledge of users.
Google knows more about what users intend to do based on what they search for. Facebook knows more about individual likes, activities, interests, etc. Facebook likely won't ever compete with Google's AdWords business (barring the real possibility of a new product somewhere in the future). But in display advertising, building a user profile is more valuable, as it is a much less intent based ad. It's a fact that Facebook is better at this than Google, because Facebook display performs markedly better than Google Display.
> Facebook knows personal details, mood, etc for people who explicitly choose to share these things with their friends, or participate on Facebook in other ways.
Facebook knows so, so, so much more than just this. Facebook knows about events you go to and are interested in. Facebook knows the type of content that you are most likely to click. Facebook knows what you are most interested in.
I don't know, I post primarily girls hockey stuff, but myself am interested in so much more. This probably varies per user, but my behavior on google properties probably is much more telling.
It's not just about what you post. That's only a tiny variable. It's also about what you have liked, the activities you've done in apps and other sites with data-sharing agreements, and what you click on. Demographics, interest, and personal characteristic targeting is far better on Facebook than anything you can buy on Google Display. I'm a buyer of both, and the difference is staggering.
I think Facebook is probably better able to track what you do online through like buttons and other Facebook integrations than Google is through analytics.
Analytics cookie lives in a different cookie space and is really hard to join it back to search cookies; also it is probably illegal for google to do so.
It could hurt Google, but Google's biggest draw is their search PPC, which would not be effected outright. Google DoubleClick and extended networks will likely be effected (Adsense.) It could effect their PPC or CPM prices.
I welcome all competition, I frankly have found Google's dominance in this space to be frightening. I never understood how both Microsoft and Yahoo failed so miserably in this space. It's still possible that Facebook could fail here too, but they have more data and a huge advertising base that they can draw from. Something Microsoft and Yahoo didn't have...though they did have big advertisers, it was hard to get the SMBs, etc.
There is a lot of competition. But ultimately, the display ad network success relies on guessing the user's best interests which require a lot of data. And currently, Google & FB are the only ones who have it.
No, the Google Display Network doesn't let advertisers target search queries of users. If you want to access the search intent of users, you have to target the queries themselves with ads on the Google Search Network.
The Google Display Network has a lot of data because it is a large display network with lots of inventory, and it can follow cookies around the web.
I'm ignoring a couple of nuances with this answer, but it is not true that searching for something on Google will lead you to seeing ads for that thing on unrelated websites. If you click on a search result, and end up on someone's webpage, and then they add you to a remarketing list for the Google Display Network -- that's a different story, but that's independent of Google's network, because the same is true whether that website uses AdSense or a competitor.
In other words, we don't share your search queries with anyone. A nuance would be: if you click on an ad, the advertiser knows which keyword triggered their ad to show, so they can guess at the nature of your query that came before the ad click, and then they can intuit your intent. But that's not the same as your search queries, and we definitely don't let people advertise by saying "show my ads across the internet to people who search on Google for ____." So there's never search query sharing between Google Search and the Google Display Network, for a good reason: we want people to trust us when they enter queries, and if you got chased around the internet by ads related to what you were searching for, you might not search as often.
(I'm a PM on Google Search Ads, and I don't represent Google with my answer but rather giving some publicly available knowledge about how the networks work)
People use Facebook to search, too. Not only standard Web search, but search with whatever context they were doing or talking about. I don't know how Google would have that data without having a widely adopted social network.
From whatever I have seen over the years (including the present moment), Facebook is light years behind Google in searching for stuff and getting all the relevant results within Facebook. I can't help but be very amused at the thought of Facebook being able to search the web well. :)
To me (and my searches on Facebook) it has always appeared that Facebook search is a crippled and neglected product. It's so bad that I save important information I see on Facebook elsewhere. Facebook is the place for the ephemeral and constantly "new" stream of stuff to keep people clicking. So it doesn't seem to have had any good reason to put competent people in search related development so far.
Yes, good points. Notice I meant people use Facebook for search. Not that people use Facebook for Web search. You can't directly search for people on google (to a degree), but you can do so in facebook (and other social networks). Point being that search is bigger than the standard web. Google is at and business disadvantage because it does not have a widely adopted social network. :)
They do! But as i see it, with personal details, interests, location data,mood and apps connected(FB connect), FB has a most comprehensive view of a user.
It doesn't affect Adwords for search results. That is the real cash cow that is growing each year by double digit percentages.
Doubleclick and Adsense on the other hand are starting to slow down and make up less share of Google's overall revenue [1]. In 2004 it was 50% of their revenue, now it's 20% and it's probably going to shrink even further as AdWords revenue and other revenues(cloud, apis) increase.
Correct, this does not impact AdWords (save for publishers who are displaying AdWords results in AdSense modules, but that's a trivial amount of money). It does hit DoubleClick/AdSense/Google Display Network. It also hits the massive display advertising industry (most of which partner with Google for distribution). Billions of dollars are spent on display ad targeting through DMP audience segments. Facebook would instantly be the highest quality DMP on the market.
Another thing to mention is that Google reports its Network Members revenue as a gross revenue, not their cut. It would be like eBay reporting $80b in revenue, not their cut ($8b). So, Google in '14 reported $14 billion in revenue for Network Members, but 70% of that is sent to publishers. Their 'real' revenue would be around $4 billion. On the other hand, ad revenue for Google websites (search engines) was $45 billion. Google makes many times more money from its search engines than all the publishers in the world on Google Network Members combined. That's a cash cow.
while non-Facebook members can opt-out through the Digital Advertising Alliance in the US, the Digital Advertising Alliance in Canada, and the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance in Europe.
Or you can just block all requests to their domains. I have *.facebook.com and a few others blocked.
So in order to protect my digital privacy, I should register myself at some alliance's website. It just doesn't make sense.
Either this whole internet advertising thing turns out to be a bubble after all — in that case; let it pop, see if we can't figure out something better. If using ad-blockers and tracker-busters helps achieve that goal; good.
Or we end up with an internet where all users settle somewhere on the privacy spectrum in an uneasy equilibrium. On the one extreme of this spectrum we have those who accept ads served them through exclusive IOS or Android apps and unprotected browsers, and on the other extreme those who refuse to play along and use ad-blockers and other privacy tools, and simply shun services that require you to opt-in to data harvesting (e.g., Facebook and websites that refuse to show content when they detect an ad-blocker).
I think we may currently have the latter — I wonder how stable that situation is.
> So in order to protect my digital privacy, I should register myself at some alliance's website. It just doesn't make sense.
Of course it doesn't make sense, but if you have millions from a billion dollar pool to spent on lobbyist and all kinds of dirtbags that are in power, all of sudden rules that have sound people scratch their head, are norm.
> Either this whole internet advertising thing turns out to be a bubble after all
It is a bubble, indeed! The truth is that not enough people (businesses) have tried to find out on their own, so you have always fresh blood coming in!
I still get approached few times a month by a friend who own small business. The conversation goes something like this: "Wow Facebook has billion people in their database, and I can narrow them to age and interest. Oh I see 25 million people are my target audience wow if I get 1% of them purchasing my product, I will be filthy rich! And I'm talking about worst case scenario!" Then I go on into long explanation how people don't go to facebook to buy products but to watch silly cat movies their friends upload, I'm never being listened to. Until said friend drop in $150 as a test and get 80 clicks that got him one purchase for $20 worth of product. That's it. So this friend never advertise with Facebook again. But don't worry! There is probably half a billion others waiting to open the floods of business and riches for themselves by unlocking the doors to facebook advertising treasury chest.
Agencies and "those that know what they are doing" are not much better. They will tell you they help you advertise with good ROI, but in reality its the same as every advertising agency promising you first page of google. uhm, no. They all won't fit on the first page. Eventually once you burn $1k or few thousands with agency you realize there is a way to make some money but you would have to have budget in millions to break through with your product. So while Facebook is awesome for Coke and Pepsi to drop million buck before superbawl to fight for your mouth, the average person will usually lose money.
> Then I go on into long explanation how people don't go to facebook to buy products but to watch silly cat movies their friends upload, I'm never being listened to
Maybe you're not being listened to because what you're saying flies in the face of all known evidence in an entire discipline called "online marketing", and it also screams "Facebook holdout+privacy nerd rant", which most business owners will politely smile at but know not to take a marketing lecture from.
Mind sharing some of that evidence? Having worked for a few online ad targeting companies previously with large advertisers and publishers, I gotta say, most of the data we saw coming from marketing campaigns were weak at best. Most of the conversations were around spending campaign budgets fully (which basically meant reducing the quality of targeting to a broad fishing net), and furthermore ROI tended to be measured against some insane advertiser goal not directly linked to conversions (sometimes this was charged via CPC or CPM, which advertisers supposedly obtained from their real conversion metrics).
Also, if you're curious (though I can't find any links right now) you should look into the insane things that happen in brand advertising. I recall running a campaign with a very large brand that would pay us for showing users a YouTube video of their product. Their wasn't even a link to the product. They essentially were paying us for "influence".
It takes time, money and permission to convert new customers. Small business usually doesn't have enough time or money, Facebook users don't give permission unless they've searched for something specific. Small Biz is better off using Facebook for free to engage interested existing customers.
I agree it's a fallacy that a ROI is earned just by laser targeting, it's more complex, in which case FB ads tend to be overvalued
I tried it, selected "All" (130 participating companies), and only five opt-outs succeeded. Tried it twice.
And now those 125 companies (maybe the 130) know a little more about me, and may be able to fit me into a contrarian niche for more tightly focused advertising.
The European initiative demands to activate 3rd party cookies, so that they are able to connect to these ad networks for me to be able to change my settings.
Also they "detect" me using Safari (while I am on Chrome). Seems so trustworthy to me.
Again, I deplore the colossal waste of human effort and talent that is going into building a sophisticated panopticon for the noble purpose of better targeted advertising. For fuck's sake, what a waste of the best minds of our generation.
I really want to know what's the opposing view to this statement. Who's going to step forward and say why they think this is wrong?
At the very least, make an argument like "the AI needed to trick a teenager into spending half their awake time on Facebook can also be used to solve actual problems."
- free video delivery channel, that has created its own industry
- communication tool that has changed news delivery & how people organize protests
- free chat communication (with e2e encryption) for nearly everyone in the world (including some of the poorest)
- on demand data center infrastructure at ridiculously low cost
- instantly freely searchable data set of most of the worlds written information
- self driving cars
- ubiquitous hand held computers
- free easy to use video conferencing
- a social network that connects a gigantic part of the planets population (if you are into that sort of thing)
Just some of the mind boggling technology at least partially funded by internet ads in the last 15 years.
Are there issues that have arisen? Of course, what sort of funding model doesn't have downsides? Acting like working for pay from advertisers constitutes some sort of modern Gallipoli is such a vacuous argument in the face of the staggering amount of tech it has at least partly helped bring about, I'm shocked that the comment hasn't been down voted more.
I deeply disagree with this on a level that will be difficult to capture in an Internet comment, but I will try:
What you're describing is the advancement of technology, which has occurred at the institutions that have accumulated the most power. Yes, Facebook, Google and others have hired some of the most talented people in the country, and these people have continued to produce useful technology while ensconced at these companies. Previously the same people could be found at AT&T, Xerox PARC, various DARPA-connected institutions, etc.
All you're describing is the shift in the center of power. In the 50s and 60s it was the government. During the 70s, as power began to shift more and more away from government towards private capital, we saw more and more technologists moving into the employ of monopolists.
It is a mistake to confuse this transfer of power, and the corresponding ability to purchase talent, with the output of that pool of smart people. Moreover in Silicon Valley these people are deeply connected to a much broader community of intellectuals (e.g. through HN) - I'd argue that this culture, of which many members currently sojourn in the arms of large corporations like Facebook, is the real productive unit.
Facebook found a money faucet and connected these people to it; but this money faucet could have been anything. It could have been something of real social value, except we have largely destroyed the mechanisms that direct productivity on the basis of social values and now direct it purely based on the interests of private capital, which is currently enamored with data accumulation and targeted advertising.
I'll end here, but I'd also like to point out that a lot of the stuff you've listed here existed long before Facebook and Google were a twinkle in anyone's eye. You're taking things that were literally developed in the 60s and giving credit to them for the private concentrations of power that were built on top of that work.
I was talking more about the idea that we've somehow wasted developer minds on the pursuit of non-valuable advertising. Which clearly isn't the case. Advertising might have paid for a part of it, but the benefits clearly exist.
I'll also stand by my argument that every model of financing these technical improvements (at least that I can think of) have downsides. Compared to the war machine of the 20th century, I find the ads pretty tame. Not to mention that advertising is a lot less coercive than tax based defense spending or government granted monopolies.
Pfft give me back a 20th century existence, pre-internet, pre-computer, 19th century, Middle Age, Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Stone Age, neanderthal, monkey, worm, bacteria, whatever. A bunch of junk we're pouring money into and wasting talent on now.
If providing a free of charge platform for humans to communicate, organize, build bridges, nurture their close social connections AND their loose ones especially (which used to be much more difficult, you wouldn't phone everyone daily) isn't enough for you, here are a few other things :
Well no, they're "building a more connected world."
I interned at Facebook on their off-FB ad network and it was really disillusioning. The cognitive dissonance involved with it is intense, and each person's individual justification for their work makes the organization as a whole immune to criticism. There's a lot of social pressure to become comfortable with your work, I felt. Even today, people look at me like I'm an actual crazy person if I say that I didn't enjoy my time at Facebook. A small part of that was due to real problems in the organization, but the sneaking discontentedness was caused by precisely the opposite: the lack of questions raised.
There are lots of really great people there – so great that I can't help myself from thinking about what else they could be building.
I hate when people say that people who waste time on Facebook just need to show some willpower. As you say it's some of the best minds working on it. Pitching the willpower of a 15 year old against the combined minds of the Facebook engineers tasked with keeping them on the site, of cause the 15 year old (or 50 year old for that matter) will lose.
And all that, so some company can blast us with adverts.
> And all that, so some company can blast us with adverts.
It is sad that they chose to build themselves upon tracking / data-mining / advertising.
Even if they charged a nominal fee[0] of $1 per month they'd have nearly as much incoming revenue and much lower overheads without having to develop and maintain all that creepy stuff. They wouldn't have to play psychological warfare, they could just focus on providing a good product.
'Facebook is free and always will be'. But at the cost of being regarded as malevolent and, therefore, ripe for disruption.
[0] I apologise if this is not nominal to a significant proportion of the user-base.
Well said! A company that has literally all the resources in the world comes up with better advertising and engagement through memes and addictive games. I guess that is what we deserve.
Begins? I though they were already tracking everyone who saw a Facebook badge anywhere on the internet already. Or were they just trying to track the users who were not logged in at the time?
"To help personalize content, tailor and measure ads, and provide a safer experience, we use cookies. By clicking or navigating the site, you agree to allow our collection of information on and off Facebook through cookies. Learn more, including about available controls: Cookies Policy."
Am I signing a contract with Facebook by clicking on their website. Is that legal?
That actually reads very much like the "contract" that is enforced by EU on sites that use cookies to track users. It's quite irritating, IMO. (I mean the EU requirement. It doesn't add value, it just forces me to click a specific place in order to see a website.)
I have heard talks from one of the politician that wrote the directive , and they did not view "continue browsing" as a valid method. They are however only the writers of the directive, and they used the concept of "consent" as it was stated in a different directive. The interpretation of that directive was radically changed by most of the larger corporations as a direct reaction of the cookie law, and none has yet to challenge it.
Tha politician was not very happy about the company lawyers change in complying with the "explicit informed consent" requirement, as that is the strongest from of consent that EU directives uses, and it basically is a ticking time bomb until someone abuses this new interpretation. "continued browsing of this website mean that you give a explicit informed consent that you agree to buy our service" is a major concern that I got, but maybe we will need such thing before it get thrown to the courts.
Will Mozilla finally make ad blocking the default or do we need yet another organization that can stand up to corporate pressure and money going forward to do so? That's my only question: who if anyone will bring a web browser to market that blocks ads and thereby malware by default?
Super annoying and sleezy of Facebook, but basically they are doing what Google already does with Analytics. Completely unsurprising.
Anyways, as a technically competent, privacy aware user, the first thing I do on a new installation of Chrome or Firefox is disable third-party cookies, install uBlock Origin and subscribe to a handful of third-party filter lists. I also do this for my friends and family, though I am more conservative on their installations.
Ads, Facebook and many a times google display network irritates me not because they demands my attention, but they do it by tracking my behavior, and hence usually shows me what I already know, used a million times, and can write review of ten pages. They take away discover-ability of internet from me, and I hate it.
Unless you're running a server on localhost, you'll have to wait for the connection to time out. Better to use 0.0.0.0 which is an invalid address and will fail immediately.
I just added FB ads to an iOS app this morning. The app doesn't even use FB login so I was suprised to see the sample ads were still very location-specific and targeted. They've also got web/HTML tools for placing ads on a domain.
They have been doing this since forever and if I remember correctly, the EU told them to stop. I don't remember if they really did stop (at least, I'm not sure if they say they did, nobody knows what they really did of course).
/me opens article
Oh, it's about showing ads to non-users, not about tracking. The article doesn't even claim they didn't track non-users before. Clickbait?
Didn't they also do this before? I remember installing Fanboy's Social Annoyances List in my ad blocker years ago and never seeing those like buttons and social media crap again.
Submitters: HN prefers original sources. If a blog post reports on another article, please submit that article instead. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
...or by using a wide-spectrum blocker like uBlock Origin, and for the cookie warning problem there is a solution too: "EU: Prebake - Filter Obtrusive Cookie Notices"[1]
[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamja/Prebake/master/obtr...