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It’s almost certainly just the phone number. Recently Instagram told me that a former business partner of mine had joined and I was surprised to learn that his
by krrrh 6y ago
It’s almost certainly just the phone number. Recently Instagram told me that a former business partner of mine had joined and I was surprised to learn that his account was an hair braiding service in Atlanta for women with African lineage (we’re both Canadian men with European ancestors). We figured out that years ago we had taken a business trip there and picked up temporary SIM cards back when Canadian cell phone plans charged injurious roaming fees. I still had that phone number in my contacts for him when I joined Instagram, and it had finally been recycled and used to create an account.
It’s a cool thought experiment for nerds and paranoiacs to imagine how you might use relative wi-fi strengths, bluetooth beacons and complex interaction patterns, but it’s less sophisticated than that.
- rpastuszak 6y agoYeah, my first thought reading the parent comment was two words: "Occam's razor". But, I still find it amusing that companies like FB want to project the image of "informed consent" whereas we have a bunch of developers here trying to figure out what the hell happened and coming up with plausible solutions. What's interesting thought (and I know that from my professional experience in ad tech) is that the "cookiegeddon" did push companies towards non-deterministic, more fuzzy ways of cross-device targeting (and we're talking about people who already think that fingerprinting is ethical). The upside is that metrics are mostly bullshit anyway.
- smhost 6y ago> It's almost certainly this one thing, and not the other thing. No, they dragnet every possible identifier and dump everything into a pattern recognizer.
- anonymouse008 6y ago> It’s a cool thought experiment for nerds and paranoiacs to imagine how you might use relative wi-fi strengths I'm honored to be called a nerd on HN... I'll ignore the latter ;) Though while I agree the phone number is absolutely used, I don't think it's the only. Trying to get out ahead of the public's changing privacy tastes is a must for any advertiser that collects social-graph-like data. So strategically, if FB is not doing this, I would pull any FB investments because they aren't trying to do their job.