Facebook expands users' ad targeting profiles with website data

To quell potential privacy concerns, Facebook will for the first time give users the ability to review and edit their internal advertising profiles. By clicking on a button alongside Facebook ads, a user can see all the “interests” on their record, remove unwanted categories and add any desired categories.

What utterly meaningless spin.

Facebook said it will also provide a link to an industry website that will allow users to not have their activities on websites tracked, as well as a link to the appropriate controls within their smartphones to eliminate mobile app tracking.

A simple on/off button within FB would be too easy (and insufficiently lucrative).

Any ambitions of personal privacy have been truly Zucked.

Any ambitions of personal privacy have been truly Zucked.

Not really. It's extremely easy to hide all your personal information, as well as your browsing history, from Facebook.

Cancel your account. Otherwise, it's you who has chosen to share with Facebook.

Cancel your account. Otherwise, it's you who has chosen to share with Facebook.

Exactly what I did a while ago, don't miss it at all

Not really. It's extremely easy to hide all your personal information, as well as your browsing history, from Facebook.

No, it is not easy and most people, including you obviously, don't understand how to hide personal information from Facebook. What you have to do is to block connection to any of the Facebook sites (including all the cdn sites) when you are surfing on other sites than Facebook itself. There are browser plugins which can do this, but they are inconvenient and not easy to use for the ordinary user.

Facebook is still relatively easy to filter. When it comes to others like Google it becomes much more difficult. The reason is that many sites - including this one, do you listen moderator? - don't give a damn about the privacy of their users and in order to save writing a few lines of own code include scripts from Google which you cannot block without losing the functionality of the site.

Most people believe that technical information like IP addresses, browser and OS type and version etc etc. does not constitute personal information. That was true more than ten years ago, but it is not the case anymore in the days of Big Data. Trackers store complete fingerprints for every access, which consist of hundreds of pieces of technical information, each for itself harmless. In combination, the fingerprint is unique for every single device/user. Even when some parameters change, which they typically do, there are many additional techniques which allow to join the different tracking profiles again. So every single access from any site which references the tracker is added to your profile.

Now you might think that the tracker still doesn't know your name. Well, for his purposes he typically doesn't care. He can assign all activities to one unique person and just adding a name to the profile would be redundant. But when the tracker sells the profile to other companies which know your name, the connection between name and profile can be indirectly established through the fingerprint.

Let me give you one example how this works. You apply for a job at company A. You receive an email back from them, asking you to click a certain link in order to see a status, get some more information, fill in a questionnaire or whatever. They either ask you for your identification on the web site or they sent you a personalized link in the email (in case you have ever wondered about the long strings of seemingly random characters in links in emails to you, you now learned the purpose). Now that you accessed the website of A, they have your fingerprint and they have matched it to your name. A then sends the fingerprint to tracking company B and B returns the browsing profile, from which A might see that you have a preference for sites with the wrong political colour, wrong religious belief, sites which are about certain diseases, whatever. Based on this, A refuses the job to you.