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From internal leaks within the company as well as external analysis, the tip of the iceberg behind Facebook's spyware empire is exposed. Take a look to better protect yourself when you're not even on the platform: https://simplifiedprivacy.com/facebooks-corrupt-off-platform-surveillance/

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[-] MJBrune@beehaw.org 118 points 10 months ago

Duh. Like this isn't news. In fact, their tips for avoiding Facebook tracking you are terrible. VPN + VM? Still going to track your data habits through finger printing which is not specific to hardware or browsers but browsing habits. Of course, as well, you can't control your friends or family's habits which are going to upload pictures and other data about you. Facial recognition is going to tie your data to anything you put your picture on. None of these things actually help. They just take the algorithm an extra millisecond to compute the data.

Even if you and your family got off of Facebook right now, Facebook would still understand your browsing habits and realistically they don't even need to be accurate, just enough data to massively sell that data to the NSA or advertising agencies or whoever else. So, I'm not saying get a Facebook account but I will say, don't make your life harder for little to no gain.

[-] Elderos@lemmings.world 38 points 10 months ago

Using weird anonymization techniques will also make you more unique. Disabling JS, running in a VM and having uncommon settings in general will make you very easy to follow around.

[-] vlad76@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 10 months ago

I guess I'll just wait for the Carrington Event.

[-] ShadowRebel@monero.town 5 points 10 months ago

You can not use Facebook with JS disabled. uBlock Origin is an option to reduce facebook off the platform. Running a VM is an effective strategy for isolation of certain sites. No solution is perfect, nor is it for everyone.

[-] Elderos@lemmings.world 6 points 10 months ago

You cannot do a whole lot without JS to be honest. My comment was not about Facebook but fingerprinting in general, though I kinda forgot to mention. I suspect finger-tracking strategies are kinda trade secrets so it probably varies. Running a VM still expose your VM settings, which basically let them track your VM around. This is the insidious thing about fingertracking, you can be followed around with spoofed data just as well. The very first time you will login anywhere, whether you use a VM or a VPM everything you touched with those settings will now track back to you.

[-] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 10 points 10 months ago

You cannot do a whole lot without JS to be honest

Every time I see people talking about privacy solutions and suggesting to disable and block JS, I'm just completely dumbfounded. It's not 2005 anymore. Most of the web these days is driven by JS. Nearly every web app you interact with, every site that has dynamic content, etc. all use JS. Disabling it entirely simply is not an option. You can find ways to selectively block certain origins, but that's it. And trying to run noscript and just whitelisting only the things you absolutely need is a phenomenal amount of work. I know. I used to do it. It got really tiresome. Every single site is broken by default, and then you have to spend 20 minutes trying to find which scripts you have to whitelist to make a site functional.

I'm not saying this to be defeatist, but to be honest about the kind of work it takes and why we need to find seamless and user-friendly ways to block the kinds of things FB does.

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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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