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Sexual abuse tip-off site could be sharing data with Facebook
- lucakiebel 3y ago„Swedish Radio News reporters have tested the tip-form on ECPAT's website and found that their name, email and telephone numbers were shared with Facebook.“ How the hell does this just happen? Have people forgotten how to build simple forms and just use Facebook?
- kevviiinn 3y agoCan't profiles be made private?
- mschuster91 3y agoThey probably embedded tracking pixels because PR teams wanted to have data on how many people viewed the page vs how many people actually filed a report.
- Ekaros 3y agoWhy do I get feeling time and time again that developers pick the easy solutions. Not the sensible ones. Some type of page download counter should not be impossible, and number of reports should also be easy metric. Why do they even think they need to get someone like Facebook involved...
- mschuster91 3y agoIn almost all organizations outside of IT, IT is at the bottom of the social ladder. They gotta do what management wants. And that won't change until enough large organizations get hit hard by fines that everyone else follows suit and hires actually capable CTOs with veto power over everyone else.
- JansjoFromIkea 3y agoPoor supervision over something like Google Tag Manager resulting in someone on the PR team adding extra stuff without being fully aware of the repercussions
- VoxPelli 3y ago100% this, the marketing team wants to have Google Tag Manager to inject random marketing scripts all across the page and management backs them up and then the development team has no insight to or no say in what actual scripts are run on a specific page. That said: This is a GDPR nightmare and so is Google Tag Manager
- somedude895 3y agoThe way I could imagine it happens is that they use GTM to trigger Facebook tags, for example to remarket people who have donated to ECPAT, since people who donate are likely to do so again after say a month or during Christmas so that's a perfect audience to have available for an ad campaign. But they have GTM fire FB on every single page out of convenience, since setting up rules in GTM on where to trigger it is work. The tip-off page is hosted on the same environment, so FB triggers by default.
- austinpena 3y agoSomething is off here. When PII data is shared with Facebook, it gets hashed before it gets sent. In fact, Facebook warns you if you are “leaking” PII in places like URL parameters that get picked up by their tracking pixel. If they discover pageview events with PII in them, they throw them out. I’m not justifying that hashed data is okay… but clear text data is not received or stored by Facebook via a Facebook Pixel, or their conversions API.
- throwaway173738 3y agoIf facebook had the clear or hashed data anywhere else you’re still leaking it just with extra steps. Hashes don’t by themselves anonymize. If you have access to the original data it’s trivial to recompute the hash and build your association that way. You could assume the data is salted but that’s not always a safe assumption.
- austinpena 3y agoI am not here to defend Meta, only clarify how data is transmitted. Data is not salted as far as I can tell, it's normalized and hashed via SHA256. They publish SDKs for serverside integrations so you can see how the code is set up. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/conversions-api/guides/business-sdk-features/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/conversio...
- gcr 3y agoFacebook knows the nine billion most common human names. On my Mac, sha256() takes 288ns, so running nine billion of them to find the collision would take about 43 CPU-minutes.
- mkmk 3y agoThe whole point of sending the hash to FB is so that they can look it up against the hashes of people to whom they have served an ad.
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- titzer 3y agoAll those pitiful ignoramuses, who have no idea how to walk three times around the block to avoid the Staasi - they need to be protected from the secret police, pshaw!
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI can't figure out how you intend this comment to be understood. It seems like you're insulting the victims, but you're also proposing a very reasonable (IMHO) law.
- AlexandrB 3y agoIt seems like sarcasm in response to sarcasm. Gets hard to understand what the actual position being advocated is.
- croes 3y agoThere are dar too many ways to track you, I doubt you can block all
- b800h 3y agoThis isn't a unique problem. The Scottish health advice system was doing something similar. https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/11/nhs_inform_loads_facebook_pixel_google_doubleclick_trackers/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/11/nhs_inform_loads_face...
- rbanffy 3y agoIf you have a website where privacy is absolutely essential, you should NEVER include any third party content. I find it unfathomable someone needs to say that.
- gcr 3y agoCase study: I help run a site that has resources for trans and LGBT people. With a question as sensitive and personal as “am I transgender or not and how would I know,” it’s deeply important to me that visiting my website won’t accidentally get my users into trouble, even indirectly through tracking or federated cohort ad targeting. - The only JavaScript is that which is necessary to run the site; - The site only listens on HTTPS; - There are no cookies; - I explicitly opt users out of FLoC to prevent other sites targeting ads to my users based on my site’s content; - I use a third-party hosting provider that only supplies aggregate passive server logs for a 30-day rolling window, which only shows me the domain name of the Referer, so I can’t know exactly where my users came from.
- aboringusername 3y ago> The only JavaScript is that which is necessary to run the site No JS is required to 'run' a site. I can and do use Hackernews without ever requiring JS to be enabled. Everything works via POST, it's quick and simple. Yes. A Non-JS world is painful, and there are many difficulties, but ensuring your site works with noscript would do the world a huge favor.
- throwaway50603 3y agoYou have no idea what site is it. Perhaps it's an interactive game or a questionnaire. POSTing that data to a server is much worse than running some clientside code. Your post is not productive at all.
- pessimizer 3y ago> You’re right, JavaScript wouldn’t be necessary for my website. I agree that getting rid of it would increase accessibility.
- suddenclarity 3y agoThey (Swedish Radio) have done a few stories on Facebook pixel during the last year. A year ago it was the state-owned pharmacy Apoteket that leaked customer information and their orders to Facebook. Once it was revealed that multiple pharmacies did it, an investigation into three of them was started. Last month SR extended their search and found 100 pharmacies in Europe doing the same thing. Leaking information to Facebook. I'm sure this is a really common issue because it's so convenient and useful when doing the marketing and analysis. People don't think about the consequences or the fact that it's against the rules of Facebook.
- kramerger 3y agoPeople just don't understand how valuable data is. For example, Sweden has a Facebook Market competitor that uses Facebook _and_ Google for analytics. Now we know for a fact that Amazon has in past used AWS to spy on b&m and e-commerce competitors, i dont belive for a minute that Meta would be any better.
- tpmx 3y agoGot a link for the Amazon/AWS spying?
- tpmx 3y ago3 hours have passed. I also did a healthly amount of googling various permutations of what they said and didn't find anything relevant so until anything new is revealed I guess we should consider this fiction.
- nabnob 3y agoFor what it's worth, I remember coming across this claim a couple years ago about AWS on HN. I don't think it's fiction, it's possible that their PR has scrubbed these allegations from the internet.
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- jlarocco 3y agoThe only way to stop this from happening in the long term is to educate users that companies are spying on them, and tell them about the tools to prevent it. Depending on site owners and spyware companies, like Facebook, to solve the problem is super naive, and will never solve it. They directly benefit from these "leaks," and so they have no motivation to prevent them.
- AlexandrB 3y agoWhat tools are capable of stopping FB tracking 100%? Right now it's a "cold" arms race between Facebook and people trying to avoid tracking but if more people started trying I think Facebook would try harder to track everyone and things would heat up. The only way to avoid a perpetual arms race (that Facebook will probably win) is to legislate boundaries that Facebook is legally not allowed to cross. We saw this happen on iOS (though at an OS/App Store policy level instead of legally) and it seemed to actually work.
- anigbrowl 3y agoIs it realistic or sensible to expect every internet user to become a security maven?
- uoaei 3y agoIs it realistic or sensible to expect every driver to know how to use their seatbelts?