6 ms·

I don’t have FB or or WhatsApp but my Insta account (using a separate email address and no personal details) keeps recommending my therapist to me. How are we s

I don’t have FB or or WhatsApp but my Insta account (using a separate email address and no personal details) keeps recommending my therapist to me. How are we still ok with this shit? The sooner we get rid of the cancer that FB is, the better. I didn’t share my contact book with FB apps either. It was probably her—a person in her 70s, not necessarily experienced with tech. The main reason this company exists, or that ad tech can maintain a facade of not being a mainly bullshit industry with made up metrics, is the lack of informed consent. It’s almost funny how we accept the current situation as normal. Because, I think that we’ll look back at these times with disbelief of reckless we were and how cheap we’d sell ourselves.

yoaviram 6y ago
Suggest you send Facebook a CCPA or GDPR data deletion request (even if you don't live in California or the EU) for your real identity. Cases like yours is why we created https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/facebook.com https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/facebook.com, which makes its dead simple to send such requests. Free & open source.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Note that Facebook happily ignores Subject Access Requests with complete impunity: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/
  - throw14082020 6y ago
    Yes, I submitted GDPR (Article 17) right to erasure requests, and I got utter garbage (please use the UI) Facebook: > Thank you for contacting Facebook. We have reviewed your report and it appears you would like to delete your Facebook account. > > Please note, for security reasons, we are unable to delete accounts on behalf of users so you will need to log into your account and delete it yourself. We have put in place a very quick and easy process for people to schedule the permanent deletion of their Facebook account. > > Before permanently deleting your account, you may want to log in and download a copy of your information from Facebook. Once your account has been deleted, it cannot be recovered. However, after back and forth with them for a few weeks, I got this: Hi, Thank you for contacting Facebook. Based on the information you've provided, it looks like you're trying to request the erasure of certain personal data under Article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). If you wish to ask for personal data relating to you to be erased in accordance with the GDPR, please use the following form: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/259518714718624?ref=cr https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/259518714718624?ref=cr Additionally, as per your request, your account has been scheduled to be deleted. Please keep in mind that you have up to 30 days to cancel the deletion. Once your account has been processed for deletion, it may take up to 90 days for all of your information to be permanently deleted. For more details, please visit the Help Center article below: https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674 https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674 We store data until it is no longer necessary to provide our services and Facebook Products, or until your account is deleted, whichever comes first. This is a case-by-case determination that depends on things like the nature of the data, why it is collected and processed, and relevant legal or operational retention needs. For example, when you search for something on Facebook, you can access and delete that query from within your search history at any time, but the log of that search is deleted after 6 months. If you submit a copy of your government-issued ID for account verification purposes, we delete that copy 30 days after submission. Learn more about deletion of content you have shared (https://www.facebook.com/help/356107851084108?ref=cr https://www.facebook.com/help/356107851084108?ref=cr) and cookie data obtained through social plugins (https://www.facebook.com/help/206635839404055?ref=cr https://www.facebook.com/help/206635839404055?ref=cr). When you delete your account, we delete things you have posted, such as your photos and status updates, and you won't be able to recover that information later. Information that others have shared about you isn't part of your account and won't be deleted. If you have another question or concern, please visit Privacy Basics (https://www.facebook.com/about/basics?ref=cr https://www.facebook.com/about/basics?ref=cr) or our Help Center (https://www.facebook.com/help?ref=cr https://www.facebook.com/help?ref=cr) for additional information.If you have more questions about our Data Policy (https://www.facebook.com/policy.php?ref=cr https://www.facebook.com/policy.php?ref=cr), please reply to this message. Thanks, Privacy Operations
  - yoaviram 6y ago
    Nice (and detailed) blog post. In such a case there is a clear escalation path (in the EU). Either email your DPA (Data Protection Agency) or take legal action. Here are the emails addresses of the various DPAs: https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/board/members_en https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/board/members_en We are working on automating the escalation to the DPA part as well.
- rpastuszak 6y ago
  Thanks, I'll check it out. I've used similar tools in the past but this one looks more comprehensive.
Moeancurly 6y ago
What's being sold as convenience is really just creepy spying
yabadubakta 6y ago
Once people accept that there’s no such thing as a free (as in beer) app or service. In addition to there needs to be serious laws put in place that gives users control of their data. And they should be getting paid for facebooks profits—not the share holders.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  The problem is less about whether people accept to pay for services and more that it's currently more profitable to provide ad-supported services (paid for by non-consensual data collection) than paid ones. Regulation that forbids non-consensual data collection such as the GDPR ought to fix that, but its lack of enforcement means it didn't have any effect on the market. Once regulation starts being enforced, it will rebalance the market where paid services will start to be viable because free services would no longer be profitable.
- bob_page 6y ago
  The notion that there's no such thing as free (as in beer) app is keeping people away from free (as in freedom and beer) software. Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it, although it would be nice if more people volunteered to bake the cake. Or you could donate to the bakery. Software is weird, the best software is both free as in beer AND free as in freedom.
Barrin92 6y ago
> is the lack of informed consent. what's making it possible is the lack of privacy regulation. People by and large don't care enough about privacy,it's too diffuse, too complicated, the damage to oneself and others is too intangible etc. Only way to end this is to destroy the business models that make it possible. What stands in the way of it is the mindset that this somehow harms innovation. (Innovating who can drive the titanic faster into the iceberg isn't innovation), that the government has no right to regulate private companies, and so on. The main problem is that people are trying to incrementally fix a broken thing, as Peter Ducker said "There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing. Doing the right thing is wisdom, and effectiveness. Doing things right is efficiency. The curious thing is the righter you do the wrong thing the wronger you become. If you’re doing the wrong thing and you make a mistake and correct it you become wronger. So it’s better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Almost every major social problem that confronts us today is a consequence of trying to do the wrong things righter"
- rpastuszak 6y ago
  Yes, we need better laws, opt-in consent and alternatives to ad tech (such as better ways for supporting publishers). The issues are systemic, going deeper than ad tech itself (e.g. conflicting incentives even within same publishing org, metrics being mostly nonsense, Goodhart's law). I think that the existing incentives can be moved, but we will need a chance in mentality that might require a generational shift, or who knows what how many fucks-ups. I'm becoming more and more pessimistic wrt to the latter.
- rhizome 6y ago
  >People by and large don't care enough about privacy Not to play dumb or sealion, but what opportunities are they given to do so? How often have those opportunities been one-and-done, "if you don't do something to protect your privacy in this particular instance at this particular moment, it's gone forever?"
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > How often have those opportunities been one-and-done, "if you don't do something to protect your privacy in this particular instance at this particular moment, it's gone forever?" I don't think that question really captures it, because an easy response to that is "Why do I care? Why is my privacy so important that it's a problem that it's gone forever?" To some of us that might seem like an absurd question; we see privacy as an obviously valuable thing that we are struggling to maintain. But I don't think that's the case for most people; I think most people adopt the "I have nothing to hide, so what does it matter?" attitude. Especially when they (likely correctly) believe that online services that are central to their lives (like GMail or GDocs or Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp) wouldn't be free to use if they didn't give up their data (and privacy) in return for the service. You can try to point to data breaches, but, even then, most of those don't have a tangible effect on people. 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data leaked? Most of those 533M probably won't notice anything bad happening because of it, and any bad stuff that does happen... well, they probably won't be able to draw a causal line from the FB breach to the bad things.
codethief 6y ago
> my Insta account (using a separate email address and no personal details) keeps recommending my therapist to me What about your phone number? Does your therapist have it? Maybe your therapist granted Instagram/Facebook access to her contacts? Or maybe you yourself granted Instagram access and your therapist is in your phone's contact list?
- rpastuszak 6y ago
  Yup, I don't share my contacts with FB or insta, but I think that she did. I don't blame her, she's not a very "technical" person and the UX is not meant to help her make a conscious choice.
  - thatcat 6y ago
    There are many other ways this could happen, did you google her address on your phone browser or something like that? IG always seems to give recommendations based on what I've watched on youtube recently or looked up somehow.
    - rpastuszak 6y ago
      I'm using DDG and a browser with 3p cookie blocking so this is less likely, but something might've slipped through cracks.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        Honestly, it's almost certainly either her uploading her contacts, or location. I know that I normally get FB friend suggestions for people I've been at parties with.
DSingularity 6y ago
The reason we are here is because the one subset of the population which can do something about it has sold out. Is it the congressmen? No, it is us. Also the professors that taught us and the departments that accredited us. Either we did nothing to fight back or we are ourselves complicit and helped them build this world we live in.
- rpastuszak 6y ago
  I see what you mean but I think it's a bit more complicated than that. It's hard to make the right choice when most of the information you receive comes from the entities in whose interest is you not making the right choice (e.g. Google, FB). An average HN reader is in a very comfortable situation compared to the remaining 99.9% of the population, who might not have time to think about this. Unless, and I might've misunderstood you, by "us" you mean the people who work on those platforms, and have the time and resources to think about these matters, in which case I'd say that I agree with your statement. What's worse is how much brain power we're wasting on solving problems that shouldn't exist in the first place. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"
  - DSingularity 6y ago
    Yeah but that doesn’t vindicate them. If professors boycotted these institutions it would have made a difference. Still might.
vmception 6y ago
There should be informed consent and there should also be revokable consent There should also be transparency of who has the consent right (data licensee and sublicensee) And there should be a way to make easy consequences for people not having it Release forms and licenses are used this way, data should inherit that. (Both systems should be better)
anonymouse008 6y ago
You do know how this happened right? Wifi SSIDs with similar strengths reveal if people are in the same area, then just correlate timestamps and viola! I wouldn't throw the elder person under the bus on this one, the tactics are sophisticated, and honestly, just a precursor to what will happen with AR. To give a bit more of how it's implemented (at least how I would propose it in iOS), Insta/FB/Whats queries available wifi SSIDs as a background process (or whatever they have for notifications/networking etc), and does the same to your therapist since you both have insta / fb / whats ... and based on the signal strength, can say with confidence you two were in the same room because XYZ Wifi strength is -Xdb just like yours (walls are strong signal augmenters), and you are both there for some time based on the background thread timestamp.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > and viola I love this typo.
  - craftinator 6y ago
    I could play Hot Cross Buns on this typo.
  - therein 6y ago
    > Then they query the adjacent SSIDs and their signal strength in a background thread, and bam, Viola is your aunt, all your privacy is violated!
- rpastuszak 6y ago
  haha, that's a good point, but in this case I think it's more trivial than that: she probably shared her contact book with FB or Insta (still, not her fault imho). But, at the same time I've worked with FB SDK which was just one big shit show. It's hard even to describe it without turning a comment into an essay, so I'll pick the two I found somewhat amusing: sending data to FB before the developer could pass user consent (or thereof), sending hashes of the (non-FB) libraries installed on your phone to FB servers. Minor tangent: The best thing about the web is that user agents are still pretty good at fighting some of the tracking practices (ETP/ITP, cross origin security, etc...). It's actually quite impressive. Then, native is just one big black hole. This is why the current browser changes, although positive overall (less $$ from 3p tracking), are a double edged sword (pushing people towards walled gardens).
badjeans 6y ago
> I don’t have FB or or WhatsApp but my Insta account (using a separate email address and no personal details) keeps recommending my therapist to me. So what? What's the harm? People sure like to write emotionally charged posts arguing for privacy, but they're always suspiciously low on details on what bad things (actually) happened. Even in this case with phone numbers and other data leaked, so what? What harm do data leaks cause? Seems like making a fuss about nothing. > How are we still ok with this shit? We're ok with a lot of shit. I think if we were to make a list of shit this would rank pretty low.
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  You've obviously never been a victim of identity fraud, stalking or psychological terror. As long as the legal justice system hasn't caught up with that (in the sense of efficiency and prevention of financial problems) every data point that's leaked about you is a potential threat. > fuss about nothing Ever heard about rape victims? Ever heard about stalkers? Ever heard about psychological threats? Ever heard about someone being forced to do something they don't want? Ever heard about the fappening? How do you think those things have happened in the past and literally ruined people's lives?
  - YarickR2 6y ago
    Do you compare FB to SS and Stazi ?
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > You've obviously never been a victim of identity fraud, stalking or psychological terror. And that's the point: most people haven't, and many who have probably weren't able to link it to something specific like "Facebook vacuumed up all my data and then lost it". And "most people" are the people who influence and make policy.
- seaman1921 6y ago
  Post your personal phone number right here and I will show you what harm it can cause.
14 6y ago
The technology is just creepy. I recently experienced a wtf moment the other day when a friend stopped by and her new bf was in the car. We said hello and they soon left (I sell eggs). Later that day he is being suggested as a possible friend. I have my location services off but Facebook knew somehow.
- godmode2019 6y ago
  The boyfriend probably went to your Facebook to see if you are a threat and what type of relationship you have with his new girlfriend.
- yuliyp 6y ago
  Or FB knew that this person was your friend's boyfriend and decided to show them as a possibility. You might have even seen them there before and didn't know them and thus ignored them.
xyzzy21 6y ago
I'm not happy with ANY of it which is why I have no social media accounts and I've been seriously considering a "dumb phone" to replace my smart phone. I simply don't use most of the features and it's a security/surveillance threat anyway.
mmaunder 6y ago
The metastasis is companies and organizations that have FB groups and insist that’s the only way to get data or collaborate with them and their members or customers.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Because it's so easy to set up a page, and get people to follow it. People run businesses on FB because it works, and everyone is there. If the web had made things easier, this would have happened less, but web developers didn't care enough, and FB ate their lunch.
cmoscoso 6y ago
Stop use any social networks from Facebook Inc.? I know it’s not easy if you are addicted to it but it’s doable.
dlandis 6y ago
> The main reason this company exists, or that ad tech can maintain a facade of not being a mainly bullshit industry with made up metrics, is the lack of informed consent. Exactly, the industry is built on a foundation of obfuscating the myriad ways in which they are using people's personal data. Uninformed consent is the cornerstone of their business model.
sn_master 6y ago
I had the same problem but figured it out at last. The Instagram recommendations are based on who is on your phone contacts. Anytime I add a new contact number, they show up on my Instagram recommendations even if we never interacted in anyway not even by the phone.
mancerayder 6y ago
> I don’t have FB or or WhatsApp but my Insta account (using a separate email address and no personal details) keeps recommending my therapist to me. How are we still ok with this shit? I'm no attorney, but isn't there a doctor-patient confidentiality breach (in the U.S.) if a psychologist/iatrist's rolodex gets Facebooked out to the ad tech bidding systems?

yoaviram 6y ago

Suggest you send Facebook a CCPA or GDPR data deletion request (even if you don't live in California or the EU) for your real identity. Cases like yours is why we created https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/facebook.com https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/facebook.com, which makes its dead simple to send such requests. Free & open source.

Nextgrid 6y ago
Note that Facebook happily ignores Subject Access Requests with complete impunity: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/
- throw14082020 6y ago
  Yes, I submitted GDPR (Article 17) right to erasure requests, and I got utter garbage (please use the UI) Facebook: > Thank you for contacting Facebook. We have reviewed your report and it appears you would like to delete your Facebook account. > > Please note, for security reasons, we are unable to delete accounts on behalf of users so you will need to log into your account and delete it yourself. We have put in place a very quick and easy process for people to schedule the permanent deletion of their Facebook account. > > Before permanently deleting your account, you may want to log in and download a copy of your information from Facebook. Once your account has been deleted, it cannot be recovered. However, after back and forth with them for a few weeks, I got this: Hi, Thank you for contacting Facebook. Based on the information you've provided, it looks like you're trying to request the erasure of certain personal data under Article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). If you wish to ask for personal data relating to you to be erased in accordance with the GDPR, please use the following form: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/259518714718624?ref=cr https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/259518714718624?ref=cr Additionally, as per your request, your account has been scheduled to be deleted. Please keep in mind that you have up to 30 days to cancel the deletion. Once your account has been processed for deletion, it may take up to 90 days for all of your information to be permanently deleted. For more details, please visit the Help Center article below: https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674 https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674 We store data until it is no longer necessary to provide our services and Facebook Products, or until your account is deleted, whichever comes first. This is a case-by-case determination that depends on things like the nature of the data, why it is collected and processed, and relevant legal or operational retention needs. For example, when you search for something on Facebook, you can access and delete that query from within your search history at any time, but the log of that search is deleted after 6 months. If you submit a copy of your government-issued ID for account verification purposes, we delete that copy 30 days after submission. Learn more about deletion of content you have shared (https://www.facebook.com/help/356107851084108?ref=cr https://www.facebook.com/help/356107851084108?ref=cr) and cookie data obtained through social plugins (https://www.facebook.com/help/206635839404055?ref=cr https://www.facebook.com/help/206635839404055?ref=cr). When you delete your account, we delete things you have posted, such as your photos and status updates, and you won't be able to recover that information later. Information that others have shared about you isn't part of your account and won't be deleted. If you have another question or concern, please visit Privacy Basics (https://www.facebook.com/about/basics?ref=cr https://www.facebook.com/about/basics?ref=cr) or our Help Center (https://www.facebook.com/help?ref=cr https://www.facebook.com/help?ref=cr) for additional information.If you have more questions about our Data Policy (https://www.facebook.com/policy.php?ref=cr https://www.facebook.com/policy.php?ref=cr), please reply to this message. Thanks, Privacy Operations
- yoaviram 6y ago
  Nice (and detailed) blog post. In such a case there is a clear escalation path (in the EU). Either email your DPA (Data Protection Agency) or take legal action. Here are the emails addresses of the various DPAs: https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/board/members_en https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/board/members_en We are working on automating the escalation to the DPA part as well.
rpastuszak 6y ago
Thanks, I'll check it out. I've used similar tools in the past but this one looks more comprehensive.

Moeancurly 6y ago

What's being sold as convenience is really just creepy spying

yabadubakta 6y ago

Once people accept that there’s no such thing as a free (as in beer) app or service. In addition to there needs to be serious laws put in place that gives users control of their data. And they should be getting paid for facebooks profits—not the share holders.

Nextgrid 6y ago
The problem is less about whether people accept to pay for services and more that it's currently more profitable to provide ad-supported services (paid for by non-consensual data collection) than paid ones. Regulation that forbids non-consensual data collection such as the GDPR ought to fix that, but its lack of enforcement means it didn't have any effect on the market. Once regulation starts being enforced, it will rebalance the market where paid services will start to be viable because free services would no longer be profitable.
bob_page 6y ago
The notion that there's no such thing as free (as in beer) app is keeping people away from free (as in freedom and beer) software. Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it, although it would be nice if more people volunteered to bake the cake. Or you could donate to the bakery. Software is weird, the best software is both free as in beer AND free as in freedom.

Barrin92 6y ago

> is the lack of informed consent. what's making it possible is the lack of privacy regulation. People by and large don't care enough about privacy,it's too diffuse, too complicated, the damage to oneself and others is too intangible etc. Only way to end this is to destroy the business models that make it possible. What stands in the way of it is the mindset that this somehow harms innovation. (Innovating who can drive the titanic faster into the iceberg isn't innovation), that the government has no right to regulate private companies, and so on. The main problem is that people are trying to incrementally fix a broken thing, as Peter Ducker said "There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing. Doing the right thing is wisdom, and effectiveness. Doing things right is efficiency. The curious thing is the righter you do the wrong thing the wronger you become. If you’re doing the wrong thing and you make a mistake and correct it you become wronger. So it’s better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Almost every major social problem that confronts us today is a consequence of trying to do the wrong things righter"

rpastuszak 6y ago
Yes, we need better laws, opt-in consent and alternatives to ad tech (such as better ways for supporting publishers). The issues are systemic, going deeper than ad tech itself (e.g. conflicting incentives even within same publishing org, metrics being mostly nonsense, Goodhart's law). I think that the existing incentives can be moved, but we will need a chance in mentality that might require a generational shift, or who knows what how many fucks-ups. I'm becoming more and more pessimistic wrt to the latter.
rhizome 6y ago
>People by and large don't care enough about privacy Not to play dumb or sealion, but what opportunities are they given to do so? How often have those opportunities been one-and-done, "if you don't do something to protect your privacy in this particular instance at this particular moment, it's gone forever?"
- kelnos 6y ago
  > How often have those opportunities been one-and-done, "if you don't do something to protect your privacy in this particular instance at this particular moment, it's gone forever?" I don't think that question really captures it, because an easy response to that is "Why do I care? Why is my privacy so important that it's a problem that it's gone forever?" To some of us that might seem like an absurd question; we see privacy as an obviously valuable thing that we are struggling to maintain. But I don't think that's the case for most people; I think most people adopt the "I have nothing to hide, so what does it matter?" attitude. Especially when they (likely correctly) believe that online services that are central to their lives (like GMail or GDocs or Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp) wouldn't be free to use if they didn't give up their data (and privacy) in return for the service. You can try to point to data breaches, but, even then, most of those don't have a tangible effect on people. 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data leaked? Most of those 533M probably won't notice anything bad happening because of it, and any bad stuff that does happen... well, they probably won't be able to draw a causal line from the FB breach to the bad things.

codethief 6y ago

> my Insta account (using a separate email address and no personal details) keeps recommending my therapist to me What about your phone number? Does your therapist have it? Maybe your therapist granted Instagram/Facebook access to her contacts? Or maybe you yourself granted Instagram access and your therapist is in your phone's contact list?

rpastuszak 6y ago
Yup, I don't share my contacts with FB or insta, but I think that she did. I don't blame her, she's not a very "technical" person and the UX is not meant to help her make a conscious choice.
- thatcat 6y ago
  There are many other ways this could happen, did you google her address on your phone browser or something like that? IG always seems to give recommendations based on what I've watched on youtube recently or looked up somehow.
  - rpastuszak 6y ago
    I'm using DDG and a browser with 3p cookie blocking so this is less likely, but something might've slipped through cracks.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Honestly, it's almost certainly either her uploading her contacts, or location. I know that I normally get FB friend suggestions for people I've been at parties with.

DSingularity 6y ago

The reason we are here is because the one subset of the population which can do something about it has sold out. Is it the congressmen? No, it is us. Also the professors that taught us and the departments that accredited us. Either we did nothing to fight back or we are ourselves complicit and helped them build this world we live in.

rpastuszak 6y ago
I see what you mean but I think it's a bit more complicated than that. It's hard to make the right choice when most of the information you receive comes from the entities in whose interest is you not making the right choice (e.g. Google, FB). An average HN reader is in a very comfortable situation compared to the remaining 99.9% of the population, who might not have time to think about this. Unless, and I might've misunderstood you, by "us" you mean the people who work on those platforms, and have the time and resources to think about these matters, in which case I'd say that I agree with your statement. What's worse is how much brain power we're wasting on solving problems that shouldn't exist in the first place. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"
- DSingularity 6y ago
  Yeah but that doesn’t vindicate them. If professors boycotted these institutions it would have made a difference. Still might.

vmception 6y ago

There should be informed consent and there should also be revokable consent There should also be transparency of who has the consent right (data licensee and sublicensee) And there should be a way to make easy consequences for people not having it Release forms and licenses are used this way, data should inherit that. (Both systems should be better)

anonymouse008 6y ago

You do know how this happened right? Wifi SSIDs with similar strengths reveal if people are in the same area, then just correlate timestamps and viola! I wouldn't throw the elder person under the bus on this one, the tactics are sophisticated, and honestly, just a precursor to what will happen with AR. To give a bit more of how it's implemented (at least how I would propose it in iOS), Insta/FB/Whats queries available wifi SSIDs as a background process (or whatever they have for notifications/networking etc), and does the same to your therapist since you both have insta / fb / whats ... and based on the signal strength, can say with confidence you two were in the same room because XYZ Wifi strength is -Xdb just like yours (walls are strong signal augmenters), and you are both there for some time based on the background thread timestamp.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> and viola I love this typo.
- craftinator 6y ago
  I could play Hot Cross Buns on this typo.
- therein 6y ago
  > Then they query the adjacent SSIDs and their signal strength in a background thread, and bam, Viola is your aunt, all your privacy is violated!
rpastuszak 6y ago
haha, that's a good point, but in this case I think it's more trivial than that: she probably shared her contact book with FB or Insta (still, not her fault imho). But, at the same time I've worked with FB SDK which was just one big shit show. It's hard even to describe it without turning a comment into an essay, so I'll pick the two I found somewhat amusing: sending data to FB before the developer could pass user consent (or thereof), sending hashes of the (non-FB) libraries installed on your phone to FB servers. Minor tangent: The best thing about the web is that user agents are still pretty good at fighting some of the tracking practices (ETP/ITP, cross origin security, etc...). It's actually quite impressive. Then, native is just one big black hole. This is why the current browser changes, although positive overall (less $$ from 3p tracking), are a double edged sword (pushing people towards walled gardens).

badjeans 6y ago

> I don’t have FB or or WhatsApp but my Insta account (using a separate email address and no personal details) keeps recommending my therapist to me. So what? What's the harm? People sure like to write emotionally charged posts arguing for privacy, but they're always suspiciously low on details on what bad things (actually) happened. Even in this case with phone numbers and other data leaked, so what? What harm do data leaks cause? Seems like making a fuss about nothing. > How are we still ok with this shit? We're ok with a lot of shit. I think if we were to make a list of shit this would rank pretty low.

cookiengineer 6y ago
You've obviously never been a victim of identity fraud, stalking or psychological terror. As long as the legal justice system hasn't caught up with that (in the sense of efficiency and prevention of financial problems) every data point that's leaked about you is a potential threat. > fuss about nothing Ever heard about rape victims? Ever heard about stalkers? Ever heard about psychological threats? Ever heard about someone being forced to do something they don't want? Ever heard about the fappening? How do you think those things have happened in the past and literally ruined people's lives?
- YarickR2 6y ago
  Do you compare FB to SS and Stazi ?
- kelnos 6y ago
  > You've obviously never been a victim of identity fraud, stalking or psychological terror. And that's the point: most people haven't, and many who have probably weren't able to link it to something specific like "Facebook vacuumed up all my data and then lost it". And "most people" are the people who influence and make policy.
seaman1921 6y ago
Post your personal phone number right here and I will show you what harm it can cause.

14 6y ago

The technology is just creepy. I recently experienced a wtf moment the other day when a friend stopped by and her new bf was in the car. We said hello and they soon left (I sell eggs). Later that day he is being suggested as a possible friend. I have my location services off but Facebook knew somehow.

godmode2019 6y ago
The boyfriend probably went to your Facebook to see if you are a threat and what type of relationship you have with his new girlfriend.
yuliyp 6y ago
Or FB knew that this person was your friend's boyfriend and decided to show them as a possibility. You might have even seen them there before and didn't know them and thus ignored them.

xyzzy21 6y ago

I'm not happy with ANY of it which is why I have no social media accounts and I've been seriously considering a "dumb phone" to replace my smart phone. I simply don't use most of the features and it's a security/surveillance threat anyway.

mmaunder 6y ago

The metastasis is companies and organizations that have FB groups and insist that’s the only way to get data or collaborate with them and their members or customers.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
Because it's so easy to set up a page, and get people to follow it. People run businesses on FB because it works, and everyone is there. If the web had made things easier, this would have happened less, but web developers didn't care enough, and FB ate their lunch.

cmoscoso 6y ago

Stop use any social networks from Facebook Inc.? I know it’s not easy if you are addicted to it but it’s doable.

dlandis 6y ago

> The main reason this company exists, or that ad tech can maintain a facade of not being a mainly bullshit industry with made up metrics, is the lack of informed consent. Exactly, the industry is built on a foundation of obfuscating the myriad ways in which they are using people's personal data. Uninformed consent is the cornerstone of their business model.

sn_master 6y ago

I had the same problem but figured it out at last. The Instagram recommendations are based on who is on your phone contacts. Anytime I add a new contact number, they show up on my Instagram recommendations even if we never interacted in anyway not even by the phone.

mancerayder 6y ago

> I don’t have FB or or WhatsApp but my Insta account (using a separate email address and no personal details) keeps recommending my therapist to me. How are we still ok with this shit? I'm no attorney, but isn't there a doctor-patient confidentiality breach (in the U.S.) if a psychologist/iatrist's rolodex gets Facebooked out to the ad tech bidding systems?