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Facebook Privacy (lack of)

I didn't suggest that you could find someone else's IP on What's my IP or similar websites, I was merely pointing out that if a third party website like that can detect my IP it must be something that's easy to do and thus it's nothing special to the evil Facebook that everyone so despises at the moment

It's straightforward to discover someone's IP address - always has been. Heck, during the early 1990s and prior to the dumbed-down email clients people use these days, anyone who sent email would leave a trail of relays through which it had been sent, together with their IP addresses. This trail is still visible on modern email clients, if you want to view it.

On its own, having a person's IP address does little more than display the user's geographic location, which is fairly harmless - on its own. Things start to get interesting where people are on the move and their IP address changes. Remember that all IP addresses are logged and stored by Facebook. Such info quickly shows travel (and timing) patterns, which are useful when targetting holiday ads or related services. Moreover, most users activate (or leave activated by default) location sharing on mobile devices, which narrows down geographic locations much more accurately, sometimes to a matter of 30 metres or so with "always on" mobile internet connections. How often you login, and how long you spend on particular areas of Facebook are all modelled and stored. Ditto click-through:-

What is a Clickthrough? - Definition & Information

Take it from me that no other website on this planet comes even close to logging as much or as varied data as Facebook. Remember, EVERYTHING that you do on Facebook is stored and analysed for future research. Yes, all of it. Every. Single. Thing. Some of the data is stored at a highly granular level. Other aspects are quickly pre-processed via aggregration or ranking them in descending order. Regardless, you are being closely watched and it's all automated. Later, data mining algorithms analyse it and act accordingly. It's called customer segmentation:-

What is customer segmentation? - Definition from WhatIs.com

I know this, because I used to work inside the business - not for Facebook, but on other projects. For most naive users, a website is simply the pretty user-interface that they see in front of them. Bright colours, widgets and it's all so clicky-clicky etc. However, behind this facade there's a vast, unseen world of the MySQL or PostgreSQL databases plus XML code etc. Few people ever lift the lid to see what's behind the front end of a website. They don't care and/or don't have the skills.

Facebook isn't evil. However, it is amoral. People are the product, and Facebooks carefully studies its users as if they're bugs under a microscope. And just like those bugs on the microscope slide, most Facebook users are blissfully unaware of what's going on in the background. This is the nature of the beast.
 
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I do think Facebook has slightly overstepped the mark but it is a free service and revenue has to be raised to pay for it and that is by harvested data of its members.

The real vilification comes via the traditional media as they have lost, to a massive section of society, the ability to control the narrative as popular movements gain traction through these new channels, ie. The rise of the Social democratic Labour policies under Corbyn.

The printed press and BBC, et al, have seen their Harris over this and, cynically (I believe) are whipping up the fear to get people to return to their controlled narrative.
 
if i wanted to, i would still sign up to facebook in the future, it has its uses.
It’s a case of applying common sense what you dont want everyone to know out there, and don’t rely on any buttons that claim to protect your security, read the small print (which will probably tell you other websites connected to the website might still ignore any security settings you selected, which they have no control over).

I found it useful years ago, as i traced practically everyone from various parts of the world from my teenage years that i lost touch with, [BGCOLOR=transparent]including a friend of mine working in the fbi who complemented me on tracing him to his address and e-mail address.[/BGCOLOR]

[BGCOLOR=transparent]Most of these websites don’t have an evil side, they’re only interested in. exploiting anything that will generate income. Lots of companies will pay a small fine on purpose if they know they can get away with raking in millions (crime pays).[/BGCOLOR]

[BGCOLOR=transparent]The main reason i stopped using facebook, as i got fed up with people claiming to know me from my teenage years, just trying to steal your idenity for fraudelent reasons. The other reason i stopped, was some people i knew, wanted me to join in on online games which was just too boring.[/BGCOLOR]

[BGCOLOR=transparent]Also beware of paypal, i never signed up to paypal, someone on a website that used paypal to collect payments stole my credit card details and tried to buy a laptop with it.[/BGCOLOR]

[BGCOLOR=transparent]It still boils down to how honest the workers on any website is. [/BGCOLOR]

[BGCOLOR=transparent]Now if you’re talking about hackers, then that’s a different ball game, to hide from them, remove yourself from any form of communication... lol[/BGCOLOR]
 
This has become...
[BGCOLOR=transparent]The [/BGCOLOR][BGCOLOR=transparent]Paranoia Thread :eek: [/BGCOLOR]
 
I dont think they are out to get you. They are simply out to use you.

Never confuse a service with a means of profit.

I have no love for social media. I do use it occasionally. I also use it judicially and never publish anything I would not want sold or the entire world to see if I ran for president. And by all obvious signs I am grossly overqualified...and so are you if you have ever read a book, had a cohesive thought, or thought of another human being other than yourself.
 
There is no obligation to use accurate and truthful information when signing up to facebook - you can set up another email to just use for facebook and similar accounts, you don't have to use your real date of birth or fill in where you work or went to school etc. - they did start taking action about some of the sillier false names people were using which has caused problems for people who genuinely do have unlikely sounding names ...
the privacy setting work quite well in terms of blocking ordinary users, but of course the corporations who pay for marketing data get a special service.
The Facebook phone app seems more problematic and I'd recommend using the browser version through whatever browser you have on your smartphone - if you've got an iphone they're probably tracking and monitoring everything you do anyway.. A lot of mobile phone apps have very intrusive permissions that you often can't change giving permission to access the camera and your contacts list etc
I'm not bothered about Facebook tracking my location since I tend to tell the world that I'm off to do a gig somewhere anyway - it's called publicity... if they can somehow make money off the kind of gigs I do they're doing better than me...
I switched off the GPS a long time ago to save the battery. According to my phone I've been in Barcelona for two years, but I never get ads for property or holidays over there,.. Damn

The thing that I really don't like about facebook is the amount of ads that are scams. They don't seem to care what they put on their website as long as someone pays, and they do nothing if you report these things. I use an adblocker and a couple of browser extensions to keep all the ads at bay, but periodically they get around it until the adblockers update their methods and I get to see all those 'recommended posts' that are there to fleece the unwary

Facebook's default settings annoy the heck out of a lot of people since your newsfeed rapidly becomes swamped with a lot of little irrelevances when all you really want is to see the stuff that matters to you. So it is necessary to cut all this input down a lot by unfollowing the people who post the dull stuff - if it's a business or band page you may have to turn off the notifications in the drop down menu under 'following' as well as unfollow them - or if you really get sick of them then just unlike them... and it helps to set your close friends and family to 'see first' under the 'following' tab on their page..
It's a pain having to do all this, but it keeps things from getting out of hand.
After several years I've managed to make FB tolerable and I get a wide and interesting range of cultural and sociopolitical content that I wouldn't get elsewhere - last night I watched videos of a chinese sax player that I wouldn't see on youtube and a while ago I watched Facebook live videos of mouthpiece maker Arnold Montgomery demonstrating his art. I get to communicate with musicians whom I may never get to meet and sometimes this leads to online collaborations. To me these benefits outweigh all the many negative aspects.

So, never post anything that you don't want the world to know about, be very careful what apps you use, don't accept friends requests from anyone without checking their profile first and please please please post more pictures of cats,...
 
please please please post more pictures of cats,...
I created a fb page 'by accident', not knowing anything about it I was trying to access wikifonia and thought I was registering with them. However as they were unimportant I'd used a false name and date of birth, no other information and when I mentioned it to someone they asked me to post some pictures of my cats.
So fb can do what they want with all that data I very rarely go and look at it, they don't even send me emails anymore.
I never take any notice of adverts on the web or anywhere else, other than the way they slow everything down so I frequently have two pages open at once, looking at one site while the other loads the page.
 
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I will make a point about how 'unaware' most people are about data harvesting. From around 2000 until 2014 my day job resolved around data warehousing side of IT (still does to some extent). I went to a number of industry conferences over the years, some abroad. The example often quoted is Walmart. If you shop there (I am assuming in the States) and use their loyalty card, your shopping details are loaded into their data warehouse and analysed so that by the time you get to the car you will get a text along the lines of "Thanks for shopping with us today, we notice you normally buy xyz at this time and you haven't today...."
Supermarket loyalty cards are not about giving you rewards - they're about harvesting valuable shopping habit data for free so that they can profile you and other shoppers more precisely.
 
As noted above, social media in its various guises is useful. The usual issue of the Wild West applies: regulators are slow to the party and until there is regulation, the unregulated market will do whatever it can to maximise its profits. A point missed is businesses are inherently amoral - i.e. they have no morality fo their own. The only morality is either the ethos of their owners, or what society imposes. That is not a fault with the businesses per se, it is how our society works.
There's a lot of hype over FB at the moment, most not justified, some is justified (my view is that they have overstepped the mark). One of the issues is the simplistic view of the likes of Zuckerberg that "It's just a platform, we provide that, what is on it or how it's used is not our responsibility". This is wrong. They may not like it, but these platforms such as Twitter and FB are publishers just like newspapers and they cannot walk away from their responsibilities, shrug their shoulders and say "Not us guv".
 
Use Tor, mask your IP, use random characters & numbers for your email address, never sign up for social media, the only problem would be that you would be living in a very boring world, embrace technology but use your head before releasing sensitive data about yourself..
 
They may not like it, but these platforms such as Twitter and FB are publishers just like newspapers and they cannot walk away from their responsibilities, shrug their shoulders and say "Not us guv".
Not so sure. I think they provide a platform for users to self publish.
 
I much prefer to do business with high street outlets. You pays yer money and you get yer desired product.
There are times however when the items that I need are not available through a high street dealer.
Today I tried to buy some accessories for the hand held Akku powered vacuum cleaner that I use in my studio.
My local dealer couldn't supply it and suggested I contacted the manufacturer's website/webshop.
No sooner said than done.
The ordering process required that I supply them with my name and address and my credit card details in an https secure environment.
No problem . . . been there done that . . . but then . . . aber hallo
But then . . . they required all kinds of personal details, which I refused to give. Thereafter I was kicked out of the ordering process.
Excuse me all I want to do is hoover the dust in my studio. What the freak does it matter when and where I was born and the colour of my knickers, not to mention clicking to agreeing to the tiny small print of a three page terms and conditions contract.
No way Hosay, not with me - So I then went and bought a brush and shovel (made of wood, bristles and metal - no plastic) from my local hardware store, paid with hard earned cash metal and paper money.
Bottom line . . . Clean studio. End of story.
I've got nothing to hide but it's downright impertinent to be expected to divulge all kinds of personal information when all you want to do is go and sweep dust. Grrrrrr.
 
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You want to get rid of dirt...they want to know yours!
 
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has Pete considered selling Cafe Sax official pruple knickers? - missing out on a merchandising opportunity there methinks...
 
has Pete considered selling Cafe Sax official pruple knickers? - missing out on a merchandising opportunity there methinks...

We did once sell Cafe merchandise via Cafepress, T Shirts, mugs and (IIRC) thongs.
 
has Pete considered selling Cafe Sax official pruple knickers? - missing out on a merchandising opportunity there methinks...
Yeh, Saxy silk pruple knickers with a bit of chantilly lace. Might clash with my gay blue boots though.
 
so just a thought, but what does the Facebook Cafe Saxophone app actually do? :headscratch:
 
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