3 ms·
Not that easy, unless the URL pbfid thingy can be easily parsed into separate "post id" and "tracking id" parts — which I bet it cannot. One alternative, which
by Mordisquitos 4y ago
Not that easy, unless the URL pbfid thingy can be easily parsed into separate "post id" and "tracking id" parts — which I bet it cannot.
One alternative, which would require significant effort and investment but would be a brilliant way to outsmart Facebook's crap, would be to accumulate pbfids in a common pool such that, if a given pbfid points to post X, fetch a different random pbfid that points to post X. If the initial pbfid is not recognised, add it to the pool once the post is determined, either as a new alternative for a known post, or as a novel entry.
Of course, FB would hate it and would either try to expire old pbfids (and risk breaking "legitimate" links) or use legal threats, which would require them to openly admit that they don't give a shit about people's privacy preferences.
- texasbigdata 4y agoSmart but now there’s another third entity you have to trust to aggregate all this personal information from a slew of users just to… avoid the same situation initially? Sort of seems like only a marginal improvement.
- aaomidi 4y agoThe third party can’t really do much with this data.
- johannes1234321 4y agoThe third party can still see which users decode the exact same string, thus derive relationship networks. (If i regularily share links to my friends they all resolve it at the third party to te "canonical" form, that third party then knows that all those are my friends)
- aaomidi 4y agoAssuming you can even decode it. Could just be an encrypted string.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoIt doesn't even need to be that. If I were facebook, that string would just be an index in some internal Facebook key-value store.
- Someone 4y agoProblem, I think, is that only Facebook can know the X such a url points to without accessing it. So, upon seeing a new one, you’ll have to resolve it. Only then would you be able to tell what other URLs it’s equivalent to. One way to gain anonymity there is to do that from a proxy, but such proxies would be detectable from the amount of pages they request from Facebook. It also looks like they already thought about replays of URLs. For me, https://www.facebook.com/VICE/posts/pfbid02XdVziPTwhmPU9XzBqkRvU5o7NPXUicAJgVy8kf1a1W51hU7EmgMmCigo9rZWxCjDl https://www.facebook.com/VICE/posts/pfbid02XdVziPTwhmPU9XzBq... currently says: “It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been temporarily blocked from using it. If you think that this doesn't go against our Community Standards, let us know.” So, chances are they also thought about users exchanging URLs (e.g. by having each running instance of Firefox read Facebook URLs for other instances). It is possible that (a part of) your Facebook user ID also is encoded in each URL.
- dredmorbius 4y agoSo create an extention which feeds the URL to FB when it is first requested, find the canonical URL, and return that to the clipboard / share dialogue.
- cmg 4y ago> try to expire old pbfids (and risk breaking "legitimate" links) Or encode some versioning scheme, and keep trying various versions until one comes up with a valid link. If we can think of these things in seconds, so can the engineers at FB.
- omegalulw 4y agoNot really. pbfid needn't be a hash. You can take the plain text url, which can be ".../random.user/post/post_number", happened a random salt, and encrypt it using a key which is a function of "f(random.user)". That way you get unique encodings for each shared URL and every time you decrypt just discard the random bit. Defeats all pooling/reverse engineering efforts and offers perfect user isolation (each user has their own key).