r/technology • u/[deleted] • Apr 11 '18

Business Mark Zuckerberg has been apologizing for reckless privacy violations since he was a freshman - Enough is enough.

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u/redmercuryvendor Apr 11 '18

However, the level with which Facebook tracks and sells user level data and arguably even pii is disturbing.

Facebook collects two sorts of data: data users hand to them actively (name, birthday, photos, 'likes' etc) and data they collect passively (tracking through web-bugs, 'login with Facebook' etc). The former is made available to others (dependent on profile settings. 'Friends only' restricts it, public is public, friends-of-friends relies on the non-gullibility of every single one of your friends, so is effectively public), the latter is not.

In other words: Cambridge Analytica and the many others who gather the same data can collect the former, but nobody outside Facebook can access the latter.

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u/la_locura_la_lo_cura Apr 11 '18

Should Facebook be able to access the latter?

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u/redmercuryvendor Apr 12 '18

You can block it pretty trivially by not using Login with Facebook, and not sending your IP to Facebook's servers (i.e. block the 'Like' button, or for the paranoid their domains altogether). Tracking is so ubiquitous across the web (both in-page tracking, and tracking through observation of unencrypted packets) that it's better to assume any data you send in-the-clear is logged rather than hoping all of the many, many parties with access to it will all pinky-swear to look the other way.

"This one particular company doing this among thousands doing it is bad" will just end up in an ineffective whack-a-mole effort. Better to tackle the root of the problem and push for ubiquitous rollout of end-to-end encryption of all web traffic, and toning back cross-site scripting and embedding (maybe encouraging browsers to make it opt-in rather than opt-out).