Hello, smart people. Filling out an online form to volunteer for something, Firefox’s Facebook-fence icon appeared on the email field. Confused, I clicked on its question mark. On the next page, Mozilla wanted to sell me Firefox relay for $7/mo. (That’s their VPN + email masking + phone masking.) I used my yandex.ru email address instead for $0. Here’s the question: is Facebook really able to track me because I’ve signed up to volunteer for Cornel West (setting aside the FB-Russia blockage issue)? Thanks.
is Facebook really able to track me
Oh yes. The “like” buttons on websites are also used for tracking people, so any website that is Facebook-enabled will know who you are. Additionally, browser fingerprinting makes it difficult to stay anonymous, even without an account.
More or less, it’s the worst-case scenario. Governments of many countries have sued and fined the crap out of them for obtaining data in a way that is illegal. But they make so much money with that data that they almost ignore the concern.
Related to fingerprinting, it’s theorized that if a person doesn’t have a Facebook account but their friend group does, Facebook will create a “shadow account” which isn’t public but still attempts to collect data for this person based on the posts, pictures, and location data from friends on Facebook that spend time with this person. Zuckerberg admitted to Congress that Facebook does collect information on non-users.
Even for users, Facebook attempts to establish a lot of metrics, even if the user doesn’t provide them, like estimated income and political affiliation, for advertisers to use.
I saw some of this first hand. Several years ago I tried some advertising for some affiliate marketing. Facebook’s ad platform let me limit advertising to people with gaming consoles between certain ages, and I noticed I could target it for people who likely leaned more liberal or conservative if I wanted, or only for an estimated household income level. It’s surprisingly detailed.
it’s theorized that if a person doesn’t have a Facebook account but their friend group does, Facebook will create a “shadow account
AFAIK this is confirmed. CNET:
I presume that will at some point also include data scraped from the fediverse.
One thing that really does help, is salting your data. The online equivalent of wearing a fake moustache, is the occasional comment that may or not be entirely incorrect. I live in France. As a black woman, I support Trump. I’m expecting a baby. I want to buy a new house. That kind of thing.
Of course it does lead to minor inconveniences. For example, my google calender mentions my father’s birthday being on the 13th of August. In reality we have the same birthday. My birthday is on the 18th of September. Once again, I’m salting the data. That way if I ever mention something factual, it’ll be hard to tell which bits of data are or aren’t real.
I’m exagerating for effect, but you get the gist. Occasionally change details or names a small bit to make your profile fuzzy and easier to confuse with someone else’s.
🤣 I like that.
scary stuff
I just looked up fingerprinting. Yuck. Is there anything FOSS that defeats it?
Firefox has blocked browser fingerprinting since v72 (we’re at v117 now) - nearly 4 years now.
Firefox does a decent job blocking it: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/block-fingerprinting/
If Firefox blocks it, why am I unique according to that site?
Not usang their services. I’m doubtful any technical measures achieve appreciable results here.
Given how often I have to fill in captchas, I think I’m good tbh.
Although I have firefox delete my history and cookies every time I exit a session, use ublock origin, vpn, etc.
maybe… but i get captchas just from changing my user agent…
I just looked up user agent. If I understand correctly, that changes every time I change browsers. Does it also change every time I clear the cache?
User agent has quite a few things included, such as browser and operating system, so if you use a different browser, you’ll have a different user agent. The trouble with user agent is that some techniques used to try and make it more anonymous ironically make it easier to track. There’s not really a good option. Although it’s definitely worth getting a user agent switching plugin to disguise yourself as Google bot so you can bypass paywalls
Thanks. Magnolia does the paywall thing for me. :)
That bites, and thank you.
This is why fines should be escalated exponentially.
I don’t think you need relay/VPN to block the facebook stuff if you have the container turned on? I haven’t gotten a popup like that from Firefox before
Indeed, this sounds like a scummy way to sell vpn. While it is true that Facebook embeds tracking in other sites, these can be easily blocked without vpn.
I mean… OP interacted with a privacy feature. The tracking was already blocked, but if you go further, you might be interested in privacy in other ways. It’s not an entirely unreasonable place to assume a user might be interested in your other privacy products.
That being said, I don’t know that I would put all my privacy eggs in one basket with one company. I use a variety of products, free and paid.
Also using a VPN won’t help at all.
Thanks, everyone, for the info and education. I’ve just discovered and added Privacy Badger to FF. Tracking makes me feel slimed.
Iirc privacy badger had some incident where they became untrustworthy, ublock Origin is the highly recommended tool against everything.
Don’t take this for granted, do your own research, unlike me.
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look here --> https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=yandex+free+email
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Perhaps, you shouldn’t make assumptions
I didn’t sign up for Yandex instead. I’ve had a Yandex account for a long time. Also, your comments aren’t clear, but I don’t care. 'Bye.
Firefox relay is about hiding your existing email from advertising and spam. It’s not an email provider like Yandex, Google, or Microsoft
I knew that, but thanks. FF’s advertisement hit me out of left field and offered things I already have. I’ve got Proton’s new PW manager, which offers email aliases, but I’m used to doing it the old way.
But how is Firefox supposed to know what you have?
Facebook is able to track you quite successfully almost everywhere unless you block them using an anti-Facebook blocklist with a decent ad-blocker such as ublock origin. At the very least, everywhere you see a “share on Facebook” or a “like” button, you’re being tracked by Facebook
Mozilla, sadly, isn’t really that trustworthy anymore. A VPN is not really helpful when it comes to ensuring privacy - a VPN hides your IP address from sites you connect to, but cookies, browser fingerprint, login accounts, etc. are much more useful than your IP address because your IP address is likely shared with other users, potentially many others. And additionally, you’re trusting the VPN provider with far, far more than you really should. It would be pretty straight forward for some VPN provider to steal your login details for basically any website if they wanted to do so.
For emails, disposable email address providers exist and if you use Bitwarden password manager (highly recommended!) then you can use them to generate username/password combinations for any website you like.
