[HN Gopher] Facebook tracking users with background sound (2012)
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Facebook tracking users with background sound (2012)
Author : ddtaylor
Score : 72 points
Date : 2021-03-08 18:47 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| m1117 wrote:
| Why wouldn't you want tracking your users as a tech company? Some
| people love condemning it. But that brought so much progress to
| humanity, if you want to build a good product, you want to know
| how users use it. You want to know how many users actually read
| your emails.
| krtkush wrote:
| How about taking explicit consent before tracking users and not
| tracking them everywhere they go (both digitally and
| physically)? Users should expect a right to privacy and control
| over their own data.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Tracking for improvement of a product or service etc. is
| different from tracking for exploitation.
|
| Also the risks associated with are different since it would
| require different length of data preservation and anonymity.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Yes, much progress has been brought to humanity by <squints>
| making sure end users read marketing emails.
| nielsbot wrote:
| I think the title is misleading. This looks like a sneaky way to
| "phone home" using a `bgsound` tag to fetch a resource from FB's
| servers (instead of an `img` tag). No sound is actually played.
| avalys wrote:
| It's also from 9 years ago?
| licebmi__at__ wrote:
| I agree, when I saw the title I was thinking something like "la
| liga" android app that did tracked users using audio to find
| out pirate transmissions of the soccer games. This is nothing
| like it.
| secfirstmd wrote:
| Whoa I hadn't heard his this. Interesting.
| dheera wrote:
| I actually understood the title as-is, but that may be
| indicative of my age (mid-30s) and could see how someone in
| their 20s would have no idea of the horrors inflicted by
| <bgsound>
| sneak wrote:
| Doesn't Instagram and such _also_ track users using ultrasonic
| tags in media?
| jerry1979 wrote:
| I believe Nielson also uses audio tags.
| rodonn wrote:
| Nielson does do this, but only for users who have
| explicitly opted into one of the panels, which they pay
| people to be part of.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Aren't the audio watermarks still present regardless?
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Yes.
| [deleted]
| rodonn wrote:
| They don't. It's frequently been alleged, but is not true.
| https://www.vox.com/the-
| goods/2018/12/28/18158968/facebook-m...
| sneak wrote:
| From that article, after a bunch of paragraphs about how
| Facebook probably isn't listening to your speech (but also
| isn't trustworthy):
|
| > _Another report, published in Wired last year, explained
| how hundreds of apps use "ultrasonic tones" to track where
| you're going in physical space. These apps need access to
| your microphone, but not to actually listen to you, just to
| "beacon" noises emitted in stores and by advertisements. So
| ... rest easy._
| [deleted]
| smt1 wrote:
| I think you can assume all sorts of
| analog/physical/digital/information theoretic fingerprinting
| probably has been used to capture huge volumes of data and
| microtarget people w/o them knowing (especially in any web
| browsers or phones).
|
| Though until the CCPA/GDPR, it was probably fairly legally
| nebulus. Still waiting for a privacy act in the US. Since it was
| a wide variety of actors, we may never know who captured what
| how.
|
| I think companies like Apple who tend to make margin on the
| hardware and not the information probably are to be commended by
| pushing a lot of privacy/extra scrutiny requirements through the
| platforms they control (iOS, mac, webkit, etc).
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(page generated 2021-03-08 23:02 UTC)