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Oh the number of apps that EVERY TIME are ran try to talk to FB... Even my phone banking apps. I understand that from a game or a selfie app. They are 'silly' b

Oh the number of apps that EVERY TIME are ran try to talk to FB... Even my phone banking apps. I understand that from a game or a selfie app. They are 'silly' by nature. But why the F... would my bank want to notify FB that I am using their app? The same applies for EVERY airline app I have used over the last 5 years. NoRoot Firewall for Android, and put a global Deny rule for 31.13.x.x and problem is solved.

magnetic 8y ago
> Oh the number of apps that EVERY TIME are ran try to talk to FB... Even my phone banking apps. I understand that from a game or a selfie app. They are 'silly' by nature. But why the F... would my bank want to notify FB that I am using their app? Because by doing that they get access to a ton of analytic data?
perfmode 8y ago
Has DENY 31.13.x.x broken any important things for you? I'd be curious to try it on my home network.
- vectorEQ 8y ago
  you can try blocking these on your homenetwork to specifically block facebook domains. then if they swap em around ips etc. you will still block them https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio... there's more of these kinds of lists out there for other intrusive ad companies.
edraferi 8y ago
Facebook made a play to be the social layer for the web. A single place where you explicitly create a social network, then you can use it from all kinds of places. Want to share something with your friends? Smack the share button, it’s right here in your app. Not a bad idea really. The problem is that it turned super predatory. Facebook just wants engagement at all costs. It’s not a tool for managing your life, it’s a tool for someone else to profit off it.
- vectorEQ 8y ago
  these ideas aren't good or bad in this way really. only in their execution we find that the integrity of humans is not developed enough for these kinds of services or capabilities. problem is that with tracking, people on the tracking side become to greedy for profit, and without tracking / censorship, then the people on the user side become vile and corrupt suddenly :D. either way there will be people enjoying it and people hating it at the same time. there's no pleasing some :D in any case , and really, maybe we should stop trying to do so, and just get on with more useful stuff than debating everlasting debates. in the end it's more philosophical problem than anything, and how useful are those to debate...(except to people who enjoy that of course!) are we in a simulation, or not? no way to prove it, no impact even if it would be, so why try to get the whole of internet users involved and distracted with it. we can go back and see, that then, it will probably just be people who like to discuss these things who are doing so, and they will always do so. is it immoral or wrong to make a profit within a capitalist system? Or is it immoral or wrong to expect someone to change their ways or return your investment just because you didn't pay attention and paid for something you didn't want?? example of facebook user mentality i saw in some drunk at a station: - drunk buys a paper from a bum - bum gives paper for 50 cents - drunk gets mad and attacks bum because the paper is a day old. really, that's the privacy debate in a nutshell.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    these ideas aren't good or bad in this way really. only in their execution we find that the integrity of humans is not developed enough for these kinds of services or capabilities. Yes, things that don't exist can't be good or bad, and neither can things be good or bad without people. Once the thing exists at the same time that humans exist, we get opinions on good and bad. One way of deciding whether something is good or bad is whether it works to benefit your life, vs. making things worse. You can call this a philosophical problem if you want, since pretty much anything can be described the same way, but realizing that FB people are greedy fucks when it comes to our daily datapoints over the course of our entire lives (they hope) is not a matter of theory. I'm not sure how you skated from FB's greed to "people become vile and corrupt when they aren't tracked by FB," though. is it immoral or wrong to make a profit within a capitalist system? Sometimes, and sometimes those profits are specifically illegal, with penalties at the level of "decades in prison." We the people get to decide (more or less) what acts qualify for those penalties, and there is no universal truth to which these penalties must be compared. We could put all board members of companies that leak data in prison, calculated at one day for every person's data that was exfiltrated. Strict liability. That is the privacy debate in a nutshell.
basch 8y ago
I would expect this from any app that implements using FB as your account to sign in, no?
- close04 8y ago
  Would any bank use FB for sign-in? That would take things to a whole new low.
  - basch 8y ago
    Reasons I would use FB for sign in -facebook already as my bank account info -facebook already has my social security number -if facebook doesnt have that stuff, im sure they could buy it or brute force it in seconds. (they can brute force a key for onion addresses...) -I dont really care if facebook knows WHEN I log in (remember we are just talking log in services, not ad analytics) -I trust facebook's service itself to be very secure. Facebooks login system its very likely insanely complex to prevent unauthorized logins. They know so much about me, they know when someone isnt me. See also, Google. I dont trust my bank to have this kind of "me detection" like I do Facebook/Google. Reasons I would not use FB to sign in -no other way into account if facebook decides to lock my account. -super arbitrary content policy -terrible support team to resolve arbitrary issues. From a technical perspective, facebook seems like an excellent way to verify and secure the identity of "is this me." I cant really think of anyone else at the Google/AzureAD scale who does it better than Facebook. From a customer service perspective, Facebook gets the human side wrong of how to handle people.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      > facebook already as my bank account info > facebook already has my social security number > if facebook doesnt have that stuff, im sure they could buy it or brute force it in seconds. Do you not agree that this is a somewhat sad state of affairs?
      - basch 8y ago
        I dont. I gave them the first two, and the third just speaks to how powerful their compute abilities are and how much money they have. I didnt say they were doing it.
JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
Have you tried asking your bank about it? With Facebook's standing diminished, maybe they'd be receptive to removing the association between your bank and Facebook's brand.
badfrog 8y ago
> But why the F... would my bank want to notify FB that I am using their app? It's not that they want to notify Facebook. It's that they get useful functionality from libraries that Facebook makes available. And they've either decided that sharing your info with Facebook is a worthwhile tradeoff for the engineering time, or they don't realize it's happening.
- wodenokoto 8y ago
  What services are you thinking of?
  - badfrog 8y ago
    If you click through to the original PI investigation [1], it says: > Facebook routinely tracks users, non-users and logged-out users outside its platform through Facebook Business Tools. App developers share data with Facebook through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK), a set of software development tools that help developers build apps for a specific operating system. I don't have more info than that [1] https://privacyinternational.org/appdata https://privacyinternational.org/appdata
  - soared 8y ago
    Facebook has an /excellent/ cross-device graph that no has an alternative to. And its free.
- HenryBemis 8y ago
  I would like to know if the application owners/developers get some other compensation/$$$$ from the 'pings' they so freely give to my FB. I think I will write to my bank asking them and then ShowHN of the results/letters.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    Installing the pixel lets you better target your own ads. Similarly, google gets free pings from developers for "free" analytics, or "free" captcha.
chaz 8y ago
> But why the F... would my bank want to notify FB that I am using their app? Probably for ads: either measuring ad conversions, or building ad targeting/exclusion buckets. For example, your bank can exclude your devices from their FB ads because FB already knows you have their app and presumably a customer.
matwood 8y ago
Keep in mind that FB has an analytics product similar to Google analytics. I agree with the outrage over FB, but I'm surprised that thus far Google has mostly skated by without too much scrutiny from the general media.
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  > I agree with the outrage over FB, but I'm surprised that thus far Google has mostly skated by without too much scrutiny from the general media. Google has been smarter by being much more low-key about their data collection and potential privacy problems. Facebook's attitude has been so blatantly sleazy, self-serving, and user-hostile that they've made themselves a magnet for negative attention. Though Google may catch up, due to their questionable permission requirements for some of their apps (e.g. you must enable all the tracking just to use voice commands with Android Auto).
  - lotu 8y ago
    As of Android 6.0 they use the Apple permission model where the app doesn't ask at install time, but at run time and has be able to deal with the permission being denied.
    - CharlesColeman 8y ago
      I know, I have Android. They will disable features until you give them some over-broad permission or enable tracking on your account. Another example is Google Maps won't let you use its "home address" feature without enabling "Web and App" activity tracking. They've also worked around their own permissions model. Google Play Services demands a massive amount of permissions, and will yell and scream and try to scare you if you take them away. IIRC, a lot of Google's own privacy invasions are conducted indirectly using that library.
- hanspeter 8y ago
  The thing that Facebook is criticized for in this post is something that Google not only does in an extent that dwarfs Facebook - they also more or less invented it. This emotional negative bias against Facebook has existed for more than a decade in this otherwise informed and rational community, so it doesn't surprise me anymore.
JohnFen 8y ago
> put a global Deny rule for 31.13.x.x and problem is solved. Since Facebook is only one of a huge number of other objectionable data leakages apps present to us, I recommend something more expansive than that. I recommend blocking all outgoing traffic entirely by default, and only enabling outgoing traffic for specific apps to specific destinations as needed.
- mrmuagi 8y ago
  Curious how you manage to do this? Do you use apps, rooted OS, proxy sinkhole, etc?
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    I run rooted, so I can use AFWall to configure the Linux firewall. Using a VPN-based firewall works as well, but only if you don't want to use a real VPN at the same time (which I do).
standerman 8y ago
Identity verification which helps with fraud prevention most likely. It only has to prevent a small % of fraud attempts to probably be worthwhile for them.

magnetic 8y ago

> Oh the number of apps that EVERY TIME are ran try to talk to FB... Even my phone banking apps. I understand that from a game or a selfie app. They are 'silly' by nature. But why the F... would my bank want to notify FB that I am using their app? Because by doing that they get access to a ton of analytic data?

perfmode 8y ago

Has DENY 31.13.x.x broken any important things for you? I'd be curious to try it on my home network.

vectorEQ 8y ago
you can try blocking these on your homenetwork to specifically block facebook domains. then if they swap em around ips etc. you will still block them https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio... there's more of these kinds of lists out there for other intrusive ad companies.

edraferi 8y ago

Facebook made a play to be the social layer for the web. A single place where you explicitly create a social network, then you can use it from all kinds of places. Want to share something with your friends? Smack the share button, it’s right here in your app. Not a bad idea really. The problem is that it turned super predatory. Facebook just wants engagement at all costs. It’s not a tool for managing your life, it’s a tool for someone else to profit off it.

vectorEQ 8y ago
these ideas aren't good or bad in this way really. only in their execution we find that the integrity of humans is not developed enough for these kinds of services or capabilities. problem is that with tracking, people on the tracking side become to greedy for profit, and without tracking / censorship, then the people on the user side become vile and corrupt suddenly :D. either way there will be people enjoying it and people hating it at the same time. there's no pleasing some :D in any case , and really, maybe we should stop trying to do so, and just get on with more useful stuff than debating everlasting debates. in the end it's more philosophical problem than anything, and how useful are those to debate...(except to people who enjoy that of course!) are we in a simulation, or not? no way to prove it, no impact even if it would be, so why try to get the whole of internet users involved and distracted with it. we can go back and see, that then, it will probably just be people who like to discuss these things who are doing so, and they will always do so. is it immoral or wrong to make a profit within a capitalist system? Or is it immoral or wrong to expect someone to change their ways or return your investment just because you didn't pay attention and paid for something you didn't want?? example of facebook user mentality i saw in some drunk at a station: - drunk buys a paper from a bum - bum gives paper for 50 cents - drunk gets mad and attacks bum because the paper is a day old. really, that's the privacy debate in a nutshell.
- rhizome 8y ago
  these ideas aren't good or bad in this way really. only in their execution we find that the integrity of humans is not developed enough for these kinds of services or capabilities. Yes, things that don't exist can't be good or bad, and neither can things be good or bad without people. Once the thing exists at the same time that humans exist, we get opinions on good and bad. One way of deciding whether something is good or bad is whether it works to benefit your life, vs. making things worse. You can call this a philosophical problem if you want, since pretty much anything can be described the same way, but realizing that FB people are greedy fucks when it comes to our daily datapoints over the course of our entire lives (they hope) is not a matter of theory. I'm not sure how you skated from FB's greed to "people become vile and corrupt when they aren't tracked by FB," though. is it immoral or wrong to make a profit within a capitalist system? Sometimes, and sometimes those profits are specifically illegal, with penalties at the level of "decades in prison." We the people get to decide (more or less) what acts qualify for those penalties, and there is no universal truth to which these penalties must be compared. We could put all board members of companies that leak data in prison, calculated at one day for every person's data that was exfiltrated. Strict liability. That is the privacy debate in a nutshell.

basch 8y ago

I would expect this from any app that implements using FB as your account to sign in, no?

close04 8y ago
Would any bank use FB for sign-in? That would take things to a whole new low.
- basch 8y ago
  Reasons I would use FB for sign in -facebook already as my bank account info -facebook already has my social security number -if facebook doesnt have that stuff, im sure they could buy it or brute force it in seconds. (they can brute force a key for onion addresses...) -I dont really care if facebook knows WHEN I log in (remember we are just talking log in services, not ad analytics) -I trust facebook's service itself to be very secure. Facebooks login system its very likely insanely complex to prevent unauthorized logins. They know so much about me, they know when someone isnt me. See also, Google. I dont trust my bank to have this kind of "me detection" like I do Facebook/Google. Reasons I would not use FB to sign in -no other way into account if facebook decides to lock my account. -super arbitrary content policy -terrible support team to resolve arbitrary issues. From a technical perspective, facebook seems like an excellent way to verify and secure the identity of "is this me." I cant really think of anyone else at the Google/AzureAD scale who does it better than Facebook. From a customer service perspective, Facebook gets the human side wrong of how to handle people.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > facebook already as my bank account info > facebook already has my social security number > if facebook doesnt have that stuff, im sure they could buy it or brute force it in seconds. Do you not agree that this is a somewhat sad state of affairs?
    - basch 8y ago
      I dont. I gave them the first two, and the third just speaks to how powerful their compute abilities are and how much money they have. I didnt say they were doing it.

JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago

Have you tried asking your bank about it? With Facebook's standing diminished, maybe they'd be receptive to removing the association between your bank and Facebook's brand.

badfrog 8y ago

> But why the F... would my bank want to notify FB that I am using their app? It's not that they want to notify Facebook. It's that they get useful functionality from libraries that Facebook makes available. And they've either decided that sharing your info with Facebook is a worthwhile tradeoff for the engineering time, or they don't realize it's happening.

wodenokoto 8y ago
What services are you thinking of?
- badfrog 8y ago
  If you click through to the original PI investigation [1], it says: > Facebook routinely tracks users, non-users and logged-out users outside its platform through Facebook Business Tools. App developers share data with Facebook through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK), a set of software development tools that help developers build apps for a specific operating system. I don't have more info than that [1] https://privacyinternational.org/appdata https://privacyinternational.org/appdata
- soared 8y ago
  Facebook has an /excellent/ cross-device graph that no has an alternative to. And its free.
HenryBemis 8y ago
I would like to know if the application owners/developers get some other compensation/$$$$ from the 'pings' they so freely give to my FB. I think I will write to my bank asking them and then ShowHN of the results/letters.
- chillacy 8y ago
  Installing the pixel lets you better target your own ads. Similarly, google gets free pings from developers for "free" analytics, or "free" captcha.

chaz 8y ago

> But why the F... would my bank want to notify FB that I am using their app? Probably for ads: either measuring ad conversions, or building ad targeting/exclusion buckets. For example, your bank can exclude your devices from their FB ads because FB already knows you have their app and presumably a customer.

matwood 8y ago

Keep in mind that FB has an analytics product similar to Google analytics. I agree with the outrage over FB, but I'm surprised that thus far Google has mostly skated by without too much scrutiny from the general media.

CharlesColeman 8y ago
> I agree with the outrage over FB, but I'm surprised that thus far Google has mostly skated by without too much scrutiny from the general media. Google has been smarter by being much more low-key about their data collection and potential privacy problems. Facebook's attitude has been so blatantly sleazy, self-serving, and user-hostile that they've made themselves a magnet for negative attention. Though Google may catch up, due to their questionable permission requirements for some of their apps (e.g. you must enable all the tracking just to use voice commands with Android Auto).
- lotu 8y ago
  As of Android 6.0 they use the Apple permission model where the app doesn't ask at install time, but at run time and has be able to deal with the permission being denied.
  - CharlesColeman 8y ago
    I know, I have Android. They will disable features until you give them some over-broad permission or enable tracking on your account. Another example is Google Maps won't let you use its "home address" feature without enabling "Web and App" activity tracking. They've also worked around their own permissions model. Google Play Services demands a massive amount of permissions, and will yell and scream and try to scare you if you take them away. IIRC, a lot of Google's own privacy invasions are conducted indirectly using that library.
hanspeter 8y ago
The thing that Facebook is criticized for in this post is something that Google not only does in an extent that dwarfs Facebook - they also more or less invented it. This emotional negative bias against Facebook has existed for more than a decade in this otherwise informed and rational community, so it doesn't surprise me anymore.

JohnFen 8y ago

> put a global Deny rule for 31.13.x.x and problem is solved. Since Facebook is only one of a huge number of other objectionable data leakages apps present to us, I recommend something more expansive than that. I recommend blocking all outgoing traffic entirely by default, and only enabling outgoing traffic for specific apps to specific destinations as needed.

mrmuagi 8y ago
Curious how you manage to do this? Do you use apps, rooted OS, proxy sinkhole, etc?
- JohnFen 8y ago
  I run rooted, so I can use AFWall to configure the Linux firewall. Using a VPN-based firewall works as well, but only if you don't want to use a real VPN at the same time (which I do).

standerman 8y ago

Identity verification which helps with fraud prevention most likely. It only has to prevent a small % of fraud attempts to probably be worthwhile for them.