[HN Gopher] Facebook has started to encrypt links to counter pri...
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Facebook has started to encrypt links to counter privacy-improving
URL Stripping
Author : ColinWright
Score : 185 points
Date : 2022-07-17 17:43 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ghacks.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ghacks.net)
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| considering that FB did and does serve a purpose beyond
| meaninglessly scrolling through your timeline and liking pictures
| - f.x. organising and advertising events or managing group
| interactions. is there a new FB - something that could replace it
| or maybe even did? I'm off FB now for about six years but
| sometimes I wonder if I'm missing out sometimes. I really don't
| want to move back in.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| The ideal solution here is to stop using Facebook.
| krupan wrote:
| And like all ideals, that's easier said than done
| [deleted]
| kareemsabri wrote:
| Yeah most things involve tradeoffs.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| privileged solution. In many countries Facebook is the de facto
| communication infrastructure. They own four of the five largest
| communication platforms in the world.
|
| The ideal solution is to hit them with the hammer until morale
| improves. Regulators need to wake up and just start fining them
| absurd amounts of money and keep it vague until Facebook et al.
| are scared enough to comply and then some.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| Facebook is facebook.com, that's what the article is about. I
| don't know what other communication platforms aside from
| WhatsApp you're referring to, but they aren't relevant to the
| discussion.
|
| If you think it's necessary to caveat that if you rely on
| facebook.com as your "communication infrastructure" (not that
| many countries would fit that bill) then you shouldn't delete
| it, I'm happy to do so.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| messenger, whatsapp and instagram. And of course they're
| relevant because if Facebook employs these tactics on one
| site there's no reason to believe they won't do equivalent
| things anywhere else. They own the largest competitors to
| their own products, obviously that's relevant because it
| shows how strong their grip is and that there's no genuine
| alternatives.
|
| "delete it" isn't a solution at all. You may as well say
| "turn the electricity off". People deserve privacy when
| services are provided to them by private companies, that's
| not a bonus, it ought to be a fundamental right. It's not
| the job of individuals to take on trillion dollar
| multinationals.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| Delete it is absolutely a solution. You may not like it,
| but it's a solution.
|
| For some reason people here seem to think I'm precluding
| regulatory action against Facebook. I'm not. I just also
| think it's better not to use it.
| ColinWright wrote:
| Regrettably, I have family members with whom I really must stay
| in touch, but who think that FB _is_ the internet. No matter
| what I 've said, what I've shown them, and what I've encouraged
| them to do, there is nothing to replace it.
|
| They can post photos, statuses, chat with friends, reply to
| other friends' posts ... what can replace FB for them?
|
| Nothing. So I'm forced to stay on FB.
|
| Vile platform, no alternative.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I traveled all around the world before Facebook was a thing,
| and it never prevented me from keeping in touch with the
| people that mattered.
|
| What you realy mean is that you value more the convenience it
| offers that the price to pay for using it.
| ColinWright wrote:
| So did I. But things have changed, and some of those people
| with whom I remained in contact now use FB to the near
| exclusion of everything else.
|
| These people are family in their 90s, for whom well-meaning
| children and grand-children have set up on FB. They don't
| use email, they can't write letters because of arthritis
| (and time delays ... international post can be _very_
| slow), and effectively the only async comms they use at all
| is FB.
|
| I'd ask that you not try to tell me what I really mean.
| ratww wrote:
| They're 90? I wonder if it couldn't be replaced by a
| weekly phone call.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| In my experience, almost everybody over 60 really prefers
| to talk on the phone anyways
| ColinWright wrote:
| For reference, I'm 60, nearly 61, my mother is 90, nearly
| 91, and we are a long-lived family. I phone my mother
| three times a week.
|
| For the rest, see my comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131180
| ratww wrote:
| Yeah, for your mother definitely makes sense to already
| have more than one weekly phone call, but I was thinking
| about other family members.
|
| Reading your post, it seems Facebook is a bit of a
| recreational activity to keep them sharp and social,
| which is good. What I was thinking is whether you need to
| participate in it, since the people this age I know is
| more than willing to keeping me up to date on all
| interesting stuff by talking. But of course each family
| is different so I'll just assume you know what you're
| doing!
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| > What you realy mean is that you value more the
| convenience it offers that the price to pay for using it.
|
| People should be more charitable.
|
| They said that they must stay in touch with these people
| and that these people can't seem to use other things. Often
| times you have to stay in contact with family members
| because they aren't able to properly care for themselves.
| Those same people may not have the ability to easily change
| how they interact with the digital world due to mental
| health issues and you have no choice but to meet them where
| they are.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| I think this is largely a straw man, or taking an extreme
| case as representative.
|
| I have friends that are not on Facebook. It requires more
| effort to stay in touch with them (for example, calling
| them on the phone) but it's doable. I don't see how a
| thing that was invented 10 years ago is now the sole
| method of communication with loved ones.
|
| That said, I agree it's not without cost to delete
| Facebook.
| root_axis wrote:
| Photos and statuses are nice, but not essential. Though
| conversely, I'd say that getting tracked online isn't really
| a big deal either.
| jancsika wrote:
| Your last two sentences don't pass the smell test.
|
| There's even graceful degradation in your set of solutions:
|
| 1. You drop FB. Now you just look on your spouse's Facebook
| when necessary, and your family learns to tell your spouse to
| show you stuff on FB. Annoying? Yes. Unworkable? No.
|
| 2. Your entire immediate family drops Facebook. At least one
| (if not all of you) can still communicate with the rest over
| text. And the rest of your family knows how to send a photo
| over text on an Iphone. Annoying to extended fam? Maybe.
| Unworkable? Definitely not. (In fact, I'd be willing to bet
| that it cuts out extended family spam and makes those moments
| of connection more meaningful.)
|
| 3. You attempt a quixotic adventure to switching your _entire
| extended family_ over to some half-baked decentralized
| alternative to Facebook that will be usable in forever minus
| a day. Impossible? Yes. So choose #1 or #2 above.
| ColinWright wrote:
| I have 10 to 15 family members in their 80s and 90s who use
| FB. A group has been set up for them, and they post photos
| and comments, and they chat with each other using
| Messenger. These are people who don't know of and honestly
| don't care about the difference between the internet and
| the web, and to them, "The Internet" simply _is_ Facebook.
|
| Using the tech is already hard for them. Some are partially
| sighted, some have mobility issues, some have arthritis,
| all can easily use FB to stay in touch.
|
| And they don't use anything else.
|
| It's just not an option to try to get them to change, it
| really isn't. Please, _please_ do me the courtesy of
| accepting that I 've done the analysis. Many times. It's
| simply not a reasonable objective.
|
| And no, I won't squat on someone else's FB account so I can
| stay in touch.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ratww wrote:
| My family replaced FB with WhatsApp. So have most of my
| friends (although with friends it's mostly Signal).
|
| Sure, it's a completely different kind of platform, but it
| serves well. People post their travel pictures there, people
| ask random stuff and the group can discuss, we can have
| private discussions by clicking one name.
|
| Sure, it's still Meta, and there's still a lot of bullshit
| groups, but at least I don't have to be exposed by it, nor do
| baby/kid pictures are exposed to the world, nor do I give
| money to Meta.
|
| Of course, maybe by "Facebook" you mean "Messenger", which is
| more popular than it should in the US. Replacing FB with
| WhatsApp or Signal is possible because my family and friends
| are around Latin America, Europe and Asia, where nobody uses
| Messenger anyways.
| [deleted]
| bastardoperator wrote:
| So they don't understand email, phones or text messaging
| where people have been doing what they're doing now for
| years? I have some family that are like your, I shutdown my
| Facebook profile, and now I just call them on the phone now
| and we actually communicate more frequently and have better
| conversations.
| ColinWright wrote:
| See my other replies:
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131013
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131180
| kareemsabri wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair. There's a cost. I've deleted it a couple
| years ago. I miss out on some stuff for sure. I have an
| iMessage group chat with my family as a replacement, but of
| course not the extended family and certainly not the more
| distant friends.
| FrenchDevRemote wrote:
| What about SMS and phone calls?
|
| It's like saying I need alcohol to stay in touch with my
| alcoholic friend. No you don't.
| ColinWright wrote:
| See my reply here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131180
| robolange wrote:
| I don't use Facebook. I never have and I never will. For the
| people I care about, I use SMS and email. For the more
| enlightened, we use Signal. You pretty quickly figure out who
| actually cares about you, and who doesn't, and the latter
| filters out of your life naturally and painlessly. If your
| only interaction is a soulless "like" on Facebook every now
| and then, are they really in your life at all? Or is it just
| performative; a pretend relationship?
| LightG wrote:
| ColinWright wrote:
| I'm going to be blunt, and I'm neither going to apologise
| for it, nor ask your forgiveness or understanding.
|
| Do you really think I haven't considered all these points?
| Do you really think I haven't considered alternatives? I
| have, and I have, and my conclusion is that I (a) want to
| stay in touch with these people, and (b) have no effective
| alternative.
|
| These are people I care about, who care about me, and who
| are, today, using FB almost to the exclusion of anything
| else because they find it convenient and have given up
| nearly everything else. Despite _many_ attempts they are
| unwilling or unable to use email as effectively as they use
| FB, and proliferating platforms would do them no favours at
| all.
|
| You, and several others in this discussion, are using what
| you believe to be ironclad reasoning to replace _any_ sense
| of understanding, sympathy, or empathy.
| AlphaSite wrote:
| I think there's something to be said about being
| uncompromising and unwilling to accommodate others. It
| shows some amount of conviction which is admirable but
| conversely I think, accommodating others shows empathy
| and care for them.
|
| I think the argument that this filters out those who do
| not care could also illustrate that they them self also
| do not care (not that loosing friends to mutual apathy is
| a terrible thing ultimately).
| jancsika wrote:
| > These are people I care about, who care about me, and
| who are, today, using FB almost to the exclusion of
| anything else because they find it convenient and have
| given up nearly everything else.
|
| Just to be clear-- they send and receive rich content
| over the FB app (taking and forwarding pictures and/or
| video, etc.), but they don't know how to send/receive
| that content through text messages?
|
| Not trying to be unsympathetic-- it's just that every
| non-technical user of a smartphone I've ever seen
| degrades to text messages.
| ColinWright wrote:
| Using FB to post photos is really, _really_ easy. Sending
| photos via SMS costs money under the plans they use.
|
| And you're asking people in their 90s to become familiar
| with more than one interface when they struggle to
| understand that "internet" is not "the web", and "the
| web" is not "Facebook", and worse, they think FB is
| everything.
|
| And for them, it is. It's the only interface they use.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| It's not a lack of empathy or understanding it's that
| those of us who faced the dilemma you seem stuck on found
| the people who care and we care about still found ways to
| communicate after we left Facebook. Calls and texts are
| sufficient. I'm sorry you feel that trapped though.
| Something seems off in your replies. And ultimately
| nobody here has said anything that you have to listen to
| but you seem pretty defensive.
| ColinWright wrote:
| > _Calls and texts are sufficient._
|
| No, they're not. I refer you to my comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131180
|
| > _... you seem pretty defensive._
|
| I'm really rather tired of people saying "Well just stop
| using FB" while apparently expending _zero_ effort to
| understand the context.
|
| I'll stop now.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| There was a time my entire network was on Facebook. I
| decided I didn't want to be anymore. I reached out to
| everyone who was important to me off Facebook. Within 12
| months, I knew who I was actually important to too. Sure,
| some of them I now only speak to once or twice a year,
| compared to comments regularly on posts, but the
| interactions are much deeper and more meaningful than
| that superficial FB interactions.
|
| It wasn't easy. It was worth it. This isn't for everyone,
| and depends in your own stage in life. Be safe, be
| strong, be happy.
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| Out of curiosity, did you consider good old paper mail?
| That is what I switched to with my relatives, we just
| exchange letters once or twice a month. Sharing photos is
| easy, just put it into the envelope. Seems to work fine
| even with my grandparents (they seems to prefer it
| honestly, feels more personal they say).
|
| I'm honestly curious if you considered this and why did
| you rule it out?
| ColinWright wrote:
| That would help with single-point-contact, but it doesn't
| help with "The Group". It would also be a problem with
| several of them who struggle to write physically because
| of arthritis and poor eyesight, but who have learned to
| use the FB app or the web interface on a laptop/desktop
| where the tech can help.
|
| But they (most of them) don't know how to use email,
| despite my trying to coach and coax them through it
| multiple times. Their children or niblings have set them
| up on FB, taught them how to use it, and it's the _only_
| thing they use.
|
| I do send a monthly letter to my mother's 97 year-old
| sister -- my aunt -- because she doesn't use a computer
| at all, and doesn't even use SMS. But she can't write
| back to me, so I rely on getting news from her via the
| phone calls I have with my mother.
|
| Part of the problem is that these relatives (and pseudo-
| relatives, very close friends of my parents who were like
| aunts and uncles) have an relatively (pardon the pun)
| active group, posting photos and statuses (individually
| rarely, but as a group there's a post a day on average)
| which keeps the group connected and active. And they want
| to know what I'm doing.
|
| The many-to-many aspect of FB really makes it a winner,
| along with the ease of posting, reading, and staying in
| touch with the group as a whole. As a platform for
| capabilities it's genuinely fantastic. It's the
| underlying cesspit of scumminess that's the problem.
|
| Hope that answers your question.
| Macha wrote:
| Is the inverse not true? If you interpret your family
| member's refusal to migrate from Messenger to Signal as
| them not caring about you, what does that say of your
| refusal to use Messenger for them?
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| endorphine wrote:
| It really isn't.
|
| The reason I don't want to use Facebook is it's against
| my principles and ethos. What's my family's reason for
| not wanting to use Signal?
|
| (I'm not the parent poster.)
| robolange wrote:
| Exactly. At some point I've had a conversation with most
| of the people who have filtered out of my life over this.
| I explained the reasons why I feel that Mark Zuckerberg
| is a sociopathic scumbag and his company is a cancer upon
| humanity, with the consequence that I won't knowingly use
| any product made by any company he owns or controls. For
| those who've filtered out of my life, their response was
| mostly along the lines of, "You said words, but I wasn't
| paying attention. I think Facebook is fun."
|
| For most of the non-techie people in my life, I just
| communicate via common open protocols like SMS and email,
| things everyone can use easily. I do encourage people to
| try Matrix or Signal, but I certainly don't require those
| to communicate with me.
| ColinWright wrote:
| > _... SMS and email, things everyone can use easily._
|
| I beg to differ. I have direct personal experience of a
| number of people who find FB far, _far_ easier to use
| than SMS or email. These are close family members in
| their 90s who don 't know how to use email[0], and
| struggle to use SMSs because of sight problems and
| physical problems such as arthritis.
|
| I pleased for you that you've been able to avoid people
| who use FB. I wish you'd grant me the courtesy of
| accepting that other people have a different experience
| from yours. I agree with you entirely that MZ is a
| sociopathic scumbag, but I am unwilling to lose contact
| with close family members, even though they literally use
| no communications method other than FB.
|
| [0] Despite using FB they don't use email, because FB was
| set up for them by others, and they don't even know how
| to send or receive emails.
| ratww wrote:
| Oh man. I used to be up to around 2014 the last asshole
| keeping a specific group in Facebook Messenger. It wasn't
| much of a problem for them because my friends were using
| FB for other stuff anyways, but they wanted to move to
| WhatsApp (now they're on Signal), an app I didn't really
| used.
|
| What it took for me to bite the bullet and accept
| changing platforms was all of them agreeing on moving,
| and then one of them making a hard stance.
|
| Sorry that wasn't much of an answer, but I guess my point
| is that you (EDIT: royal you, not talking to you
| directly) gotta find sympathetic people before you
| declare war on the ones that don't wanna change.
| robolange wrote:
| I feel like various people are misunderstanding what I've
| written, so I'll try to clarify here.
|
| > before you declare war on the ones that don't wanna
| change
|
| I never "declared war" on anyone. I guess it's a lot
| easier having never used Facebook or Facebook products. I
| had a bad feeling about them from the very beginning and
| I've only ever felt more right in that feeling.
|
| What would usually happen was, I'd meet someone new at
| some event, or maybe I'd be talking to a relative at a
| family gathering, and they'd say something like, "What's
| your Facebook? I'd like to add you to GroupX," and I'd
| reply that I didn't use Facebook. Then they'd follow up
| with, "You should join, it's <blah blah blah>," to which
| I'd politely explain why I won't ever join Facebook. And
| then one of two things would happen. Either they'd
| understand, and we'd exchange phone numbers or email
| addresses, or their eyes would glaze over and they'd find
| some excuse to walk away.
|
| For the latter group, obviously we didn't interact
| online. For the former group, I'd text or email, and
| maybe they'd respond, and we'd have what I consider to be
| a normal relationship, or maybe they'd rarely or never
| respond, and we'd have no relationship. But in either
| case, I wasn't haranguing people not to use Facebook; I
| just wasn't using it. If not using Facebook meant I
| didn't have a relationship with someone, I was okay with
| that.
| ratww wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't really assume you did anything, I was
| just speaking in general terms from my own experience
| being in the other side and was citing my friend's
| strategy.
|
| I should have been clearer about that in my message, as I
| hate when people do that out of nowhere to me. Sorry.
| robolange wrote:
| I continued communicating with those I cared about via
| standardized technologies. Those who communicated back in
| kind I still keep up with. Those for whom this was a
| bridge too far, are no longer in my life. Maybe they
| weren't ever really important to me, which made it easy
| for me to drop them? Or maybe they were, but I was never
| important to them? It doesn't really matter; they're not
| in my life anymore, and I'm okay with that.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| "Hey mom stop using Facebook? No, well bye!" -- what an
| awful way to live.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| More like, "I'll call you on the phone once a week to
| catch up"
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I don't think OP is interested in naturally and painlessly
| filtering out his family.
| just_for_you wrote:
| Can't echo this enough.
|
| I've been railroaded into using Facebook 2 or 3 times by
| friends, family and even my SO, and my experience each and
| every time was a soulless one like yours. It was just a
| non-stop stream of people and their friends reposting
| shallow things they found on the Internet, inspirational
| quotes, and political garbage. And if people did comment,
| they were just brief quips - probably just enough effort to
| try to manipulate others to like+comment back on their own
| content.
|
| Email and phone's all I need. If people can't put in the
| effort to remember or catch up with me, even if it's just
| every few months, then they're not my friend.
| ratww wrote:
| _> I 've been railroaded into using Facebook 2 or 3 times
| by friends, family and even my SO_
|
| Just out of curiosity, as long as you don't mind: what
| was the reason (or which feature, actually) they asked
| you to use Facebook in those cases? I haven't needed it
| in 5 or 6 years and nobody I know really uses it (or
| nobody admits), but that might be due to my location
| (Germany), so I'm a bit curious what's it still good for!
| just_for_you wrote:
| The first time I used it, it was family members wanting
| to connect with me, and the old "everyone uses it!"
| argument (the same one applied to MySpace back in the
| day). So I made an account, commented on stuff, posted
| pics of my cat, but ended up deleting my account after a
| few months because nobody was really "connecting" with
| each other, plus I found friends-of-friends' posts
| boring.
|
| Second time was from some new friends I had made, who
| argued that exchanging phone numbers and emails were old-
| fashioned and awkward when meeting new people, and that
| it was essential to have Facebook since it's easier to
| just say "you can just look for me on Facebook; you'll
| know it's me since I have XYZ in my profile pic". I saw
| some validity to the argument, since recently I had met
| and got along with a couple cute girls on a train ride,
| but regretted not exchanging contact details with the two
| of them because asking for numbers/emails felt like a
| slight overreach. Though if I had a FB account at the
| time, I thought it'd have made sense if I could've just
| been able to casually say something like "look up John
| Smith on FB if you wanna hang out sometime. See ya!".
|
| Third time was my then-SO. She posted on Facebook a LOT,
| and had many hundreds of followers. She begged me to make
| an account for months, so I could bask in all the content
| she posted.
|
| Anyway, your experience with people not using Facebook
| sounds on-par. Facebook is increasingly considered a
| "boomer" technology, especially by the younger
| generations. Many younger folk these days tend to keep in
| touch via small Discord groups, or whatever dopamine-drip
| privacy-nightmare app of the week is.
| ratww wrote:
| Gotcha! Thanks for taking the time to answer.
|
| Interestingly I also met some cute girls and a friendly
| guy in a train recently and they tried to exchange
| Instagram handles with me. I just asked for WhatsApp and
| we created a little group (but then again, Germany).
|
| I guess a SO being there would actually make me use it. I
| did have a Twitch account for a while because of someone
| I dated....... (Curiously I haven't admitted this even to
| my therapist, lol). On the other hand, it's Facebook so
| I'd probably troll them and ask for printouts of the
| posts.
|
| About the boomer thing, interestingly I never really had
| close family using it. But everyone under 25 I know
| denies having it like it's some kinda plague. The ones
| over 25 claim they forgot their password.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| There are a lot of people on this thread complaining
| about the privacy implications of Facebook and how Mark
| Zuckerberg is evil. While I don't disagree with those
| sentiments, it's not really why I avoid Facebook. I still
| use a lot of things that have similar problems like
| Google or Reddit.
|
| One of the most sinister things about Facebook to me is
| that it creates the illusion that you are close with
| friends or relatives when you're really mostly watching a
| superficial view of peoples' lives in a passive,
| voyeuristic way. Comments and likes make you feel
| connected, but they are not meaningful interaction.
|
| When I first deleted my account and stopped using
| Facebook, I felt initially a lot lonelier. But was I?
| After more time went by, I became convinced it was all
| too superficial.
|
| Interestingly, who I spent time with shifted toward other
| people who were either not on Facebook at all or were
| very unengaged with it personally (for example, one
| friend only uses it to promote his business).
|
| My only partial regret with any of this is that the
| pandemic really scrambled this. Almost all of my friends
| were purely people I saw in person, with no online
| component to our friendship. That all got paused in 2020,
| and has been very hard to get back to the same level
| since.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| Absolutely. If your relationships is dependent on a single
| medium of communication, and you cannot migrate it to
| another one, that's a weak relationship or it's only local
| to the medium (some people are Twitter friends, and that's
| fine).
| ColinWright wrote:
| See my comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131180
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| I've seen that comment too. It's unclear to me why you
| can't just have 1:1 relationships with these relatives by
| calling them on the phone or visiting in person
| regularly. You seem locked into the concept of only being
| able to interact with them using this specific group chat
| type format.
| awillen wrote:
| This is a pretty bananas take that conflates people caring
| with their technology-related behavior.
|
| Most people don't have problems with Facebook. It's useful
| for them, and they don't consider the bigger picture
| because they're not in tech and they have more important
| things taking up their attention.
|
| Now you swoop in and say "Facebook is evil, and if you
| don't get off of it, I'll cut you out of my life!" In that
| scenario, you're the one who doesn't care about the
| relationship, not them - you're the one that won't get off
| your high horse. You could make a minimalistic FB profile
| that has no information and use it to exchange messages and
| reply to event invitations. But instead you demand that
| they change their behaviors in order to support your moral
| imperative. That's your prerogative, but it is ridiculous
| to think your relationship is pretend as a result.
|
| Also, to be clear, you're the only one here talking about a
| relationship that consists of a few likes on Facebook.
| Everyone else is talking about a broader set of
| interactions, like using Messenger to chat and sharing
| photos with each other.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| You don't have to get on a soapbox and pontificate about
| the evil of Facebook. Just say "sorry, I'm not on
| Facebook."
| charcircuit wrote:
| Signing up for a facebook account takes less than a
| minute to do. Not having an account is a tiny hurdle to
| get over.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah but then they are asking you to do something, rather
| than you asking them.
| robolange wrote:
| > Now you swoop in and say "Facebook is evil, and if you
| don't get off of it, I'll cut you out of my life!"
|
| I said no such thing, and I'd thank you not to put words
| in my mouth. As I explained in a different subthread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131334
| FabHK wrote:
| Just like the ideal solution for climate change is to stop
| eating meat, stop flying, stop driving, stop heating, stop air
| conditioning, and, for good measure, stop using computers.
|
| Heaven forbid that we seek a political/regulatory solution.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| Seek whatever you like. I don't think those are comparable
| examples.
| endorphine wrote:
| I've just deleted my Messenger account. Won't lie, that felt
| good. Good thing my friends/family from there are on the other
| two alternatives I use.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's like saying 'stop being poor.' I'm not personally
| invested in FB, but people with large extended families,
| businesses, political campaigns etc. don't have the option of
| just ignoring it.
|
| Every HN thread about social media has one sub-thread like
| this, and it never produces anything of value because the
| premise is trite.
| userbinator wrote:
| IMHO this was totally expected and is an argument for "browser
| neutrality" --- I believe a browser shouldn't be doing this or
| many other things by default.
|
| Modifying URLs and filtering page content should be the
| responsibility of extensions and the like. I personally use a
| filtering proxy.
| AinderS wrote:
| Since there's zero chance that websites and ad companies will
| stop their spying and manipulation (let's call it "webpage
| neutrality"), what you're proposing is unilateral disarmament.
| To require a lot of know-how and tech savvy to get privacy,
| while leaving the common user to the mercy of a hostile web.
|
| This is like the argument that the Do Not Track flag was
| illegitimate if the browser defaulted it to 'on'. An argument
| that is never applied to tracking or the countless "by visiting
| this webpage you consent to.."
| cypress66 wrote:
| Firefox is not doing this by default I'm pretty sure
| ev1 wrote:
| This is opt in, not enabled by default, and requires you to
| intentionally pick 'Strict' which has a warning as its first
| line of text that says some sites may break.
| rolph wrote:
| so instead of being able to opt out, by editing extraneous
| commands, face book is locking you into accepting commands with
| the link.
|
| stretch that out a bit and it will fit - facebook controls your
| browser by infiltrating commands packed into an encrypted string.
|
| that looks alot like what C&C servers do, the next step would be
| dropping a bot into users systems
| googlryas wrote:
| Has anyone checked if it is just a serialized+base64 encoded
| swift proto with the original URL?
|
| There could be other reasons for this, but evading firefox
| rewriting links seems most likely - some gateways strip too-long
| query strings for example, but will leave the rest of the URL
| alone.
| Volker_W wrote:
| > some gateways strip too-long query strings for example
|
| Uhm. What?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| If the author edits their post and the reader then follows the
| "View Edit History" URL, then the reader can see in the address
| bar the story_fbid= and the (author) id= URL parameters without
| the obfuscation.
|
| If the reader follows the "People who reacted" URL, then the
| reader can see the story_fbid= and (author) id= paramaters,
| without obfuscation.
|
| If the reader follows the "Comment" URL, then the reader can see
| the story_fbid= and (author) id= paramaters, without obfuscation.
|
| If the reader follows the "React" URL, then the reader can see
| the story_fbid= and (author) id= paramters, without obfuscation.
|
| Those are just four ways to discover the unobfuscated story_fbid
| number. There are probably others.
|
| Tested with mbasic.facebook.com.
|
| I have always stripped everything but the story_fbid and (author)
| id parameters when sharing URLs pointing to posts on Facebook.
| Anything else in the URL is unnecessary. On the
| desktop/laptop/RPi, this stripping can be automated using a
| localhost forward proxy.
|
| Another issue that seems to fly under the radar with Facebook
| users is the prefixing and proxying of external URLs with
| https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=.
| darkstar999 wrote:
| What about it? They end up at the same url.
| plorg wrote:
| I haven't used Facebook in quite a while, but when I did I had a
| set of userscripts to defuse this tracking. It worked similarly
| to Google link stripping, by defusing the JavaScript that rewrote
| the link between the time you clicked it and when your browser
| opened it. Initially I built it because the free wireless
| internet in my apartment was unreliable and the redirects could
| be enough to prevent a page from opening. My method was pretty
| blunt - I removed element entities that held the target URL, and
| that broke the listener function. A later iteration would
| actually unset the listener event. This all worked because it
| seemed important to FB that you be able to see where the link
| would take you (e.g. by hovering). I wouldn't be surprised if
| Facebook's paternalism (and Google's for that matter, but I
| haven't seen it from them, though I mainly use DDG now) now led
| them to add this "protection" directly to links as they're served
| up. I can't tell from the article whether that's the case, and at
| this point I'm not going to log in to FB to figure it out.
| RKearney wrote:
| Previous Discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32117489
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Amazing that they noticed it this quickly. Most people are used
| to see all those URLs with encoded garbage to notice this
| change
| agluszak wrote:
| That should be illegal.
| doodlesdev wrote:
| No it shouldn't. It's unethical, sure, but the correct way to
| fight this is to not give money (or your time) to companies
| that engage in these behaviors.
| agluszak wrote:
| At this point it is barely possible to ignore Facebook
| (Twitter, Instagram etc. also). I'm a great proponent of the
| fediverse, but FB without regulation will simply eat all the
| ethical alternatives.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Replace the word "facebook" with "alcohol" or "heroin" and re-
| read every comment in this thread. We have a real problem, don't
| we?
| [deleted]
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Easily defeated by having a secondary server access the url,
| strip any remaining parameters, then returning the URL to the
| user. You will have to _really_ trust your browser, however. A
| gambit I am willing to take. It is Facebook we are talking about,
| after all.
|
| The game of cat and mouse continues.
| stargrazer wrote:
| Wouldn't it just be easier to 'not use facebook'?
| camkego wrote:
| This brings up an interesting point. If you have a secondary
| server do this operation as opposed to the browser, the only
| thing that has changed from the receiver's point of view is the
| source IP.
|
| So maybe privacy protecting browsers will start to do double
| loads: 1. First to get the real URL 2. Next to do the browsing
| with the association information stripped from the
| URL/cookies/etc
| Spivak wrote:
| Nobody is gonna go through that effort though, and it's not
| possible to translate the params back because only the server
| decrypts them. This seems like the tipping point where cat wins
| for all but like 5 people.
|
| I'm actually kinda surprised this hasn't happened earlier.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| I used to go through the effort of manually stripping
| tracking params out of my URLs until the browsers integrated
| it.
|
| I will go through this effort until browsers integrate it, or
| until there is a secondary service that's easily runnable.
| This would just be pi-hole but for the internet instead of
| your local network.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Ask HN: What is with the new URLs on facebook.com?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32117489 - July 2022 (249
| comments)
| squarefoot wrote:
| Aside stopping the use of Facebook, which of course is the best
| solution but not doable for many, the AdNauseam (.io, browser
| extension) approach to pollute their tracking data might be
| inspirational. The gist is: can't eliminate ad links? Then have
| an app "click" all of them randomly so that counters become
| irrelevant. So there is this link that identifies user X?, well
| then write an extension that distributes and "clicks" it around
| on say 1000 other machines in a p2p way so that it becomes
| meaningless.
|
| I have no idea if it's doable in this FB context, but usually
| when links can't be anonymized, the next move is to make them
| produce irrelevant data by adding noise.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| When you can't get rid of signal, add noise.
| im3w1l wrote:
| For many years I was against AdNauseam, as by my reckoning it
| would be counterproductive and just end up hurting the the most
| privacy and freedom oriented voices, but now that Facebook is
| upping the stakes it's starting to seem like a reasonable
| countermeasure.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Aside stopping the use of Facebook, which of course is the
| best solution but not doable for many
|
| But quite doable for a content provider like Ghacks. Users
| should be able to share links to web content in a way that does
| not create privacy risks, and this whole URI encryption
| business makes that quite a bit harder.
| asdfologist wrote:
| That's unethical, to willingly use a product and yet actively
| hurt its revenue stream.
| aporetics wrote:
| Were it so simple.
|
| Unlike buying a product, like a banana, or using a service,
| like your barber, when you "use" facebook, YOU are the
| product. You are being sold to companies buying adds.
|
| So what is ethical?
| StillBored wrote:
| Facebook is unethical, I never consented to the shadow
| profile I'm sure they keep on me. (since I'm an antisocial
| snob and have never used their offerings).
|
| They have acquired a few products I have used (oculus for
| one) and that fact makes it even more irritating, as far as
| I'm concerned the sooner their business model is destroyed
| the better off the world will be.
| majormajor wrote:
| Is it ethical to give a product away for free in order to
| profit off ever-increasing surveillance?
|
| Would it be fair to proposal an ethical position of something
| like "if you won't offer your product in a way that uses my
| information ethically than I have the right to safeguard my
| information"? Yes, we _could_ all refuse to use facebook, and
| only use an ethical (even possibly paid!) alternative, but in
| the race-to-the-bottom everyone-else-ruins-it-for-everyone-
| else real-world we live in, maybe there is a lot more gray
| area than you are proposing.
|
| In my view the "ever-increasing" aspect of FB's usage of data
| is particularly relevant in this case. I deleted my account
| because I'm aware of it. It's not easy to make everyone else
| aware of it, or understand the full implications, though.
| And, of course, FB tracks even those of us who don't have
| accounts.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Just as unethical as creating spyware that spies on users who
| haven't given _informed_ consent or sometimes even non-users.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Everything is fair game in asymmetric guerilla warfare
| against well-capitalized antagonists
| Calavar wrote:
| Facebook also tracks the activity of people who have never
| registered an account while they browse on third party
| websites.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| You can't just _say_ something is unethical, you need to
| provide a rationale for why people are ethically obligated to
| preserve a company 's revenue stream in their usage of its
| product. I don't think a consumer owes Facebook any
| responsibility in terms of protecting its revenue.
| xwdv wrote:
| It is part of the terms of service.
|
| If you do not agree, just stop using the product. What's so
| hard to understand? Lord knows people aren't going to pay
| subscriptions to view Facebook content, so the business is
| supported through data collection. In return, you get to
| view content for free. People just want to be entitled to
| everything. Going a step further and actually costing the
| company revenue is just being petty and malicious,
| definitely unethical.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > If you do not agree, just stop using the product.
| What's so hard to understand?
|
| I agree with you, and this is exactly what I've done.
| There are a number of businesses and clubs that are
| interesting to me, but they're exclusively on Facebook so
| they're out of reach for me.
|
| I have my ethics. I'm also the biggest loser in this
| story. The businesses and orgs have enough other
| participation that losing me has made no material impact
| to them.
|
| Now what? Should I continue to be a loser? Thats the
| choice I've made for the last year. I'm starting to
| wonder if it's the right one.
|
| Meanwhile, I have to burn effort on making sure FB cant
| track me all over the internet. So I have my ethics while
| they demonstrate they have none.
| dataflow wrote:
| I feel like if Facebook didn't have a history of playing
| unethical hardball then people would feel more guilty
| about returning the favor?
| _-david-_ wrote:
| If I have a website that has a terms of service that says
| anybody who visits my website must give me all their
| money are you obligated to give me all your money if you
| go to it?
| Justin_K wrote:
| What happens when FB violates their own TOS, especially
| when it relates to privacy? Absolutely nothing. FB
| created their own game of cat and mouse.
| ls15 wrote:
| > If you do not agree, just stop using the product.
| What's so hard to understand?
|
| We are talking about Facebook here, the company that
| tracks unaware people as much as they can all over the
| internet, not just on their platform, and they created
| shadow profiles of people who never registered on their
| platform, which is something that is clearly against _my_
| terms of service, which they ignored. They never
| apologized or financially compensated me for that.
|
| Why would someone want to defend _that_ company?
| kareemsabri wrote:
| Nothing is hard to understand, I just don't agree with
| your argument.
|
| Facebook does not offer the ability to pay for an ad-free
| version, so who knows whether people are going to pay. I
| imagine many would. That said, I am not a member of
| Facebook's board, I'm not an employee, I'm not even a
| stockholder. I don't see how it is my ethical obligation
| to support Facebook's revenue stream. Since the terms of
| service are not negotiated between myself and Facebook,
| but written by their lawyers and presented to me
| implicitly on a "take it or leave it" basis, I do not
| feel that I've opted into that agreement, nor any
| obligation to abide by it.
|
| Note that while I'm talking in the first person I don't
| literally mean me, as I don't use Facebook as mentioned
| in other comments, but any hypothetical consumer who
| wants to block ads or otherwise undermine Facebook's
| ability to track them.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you do not agree, just stop using the product_
|
| I don't use their product. They still negatively impact
| me. So yes, I think I'm morally entitled to make their
| lives difficult.
| [deleted]
| WheatM wrote:
| neilv wrote:
| I've had background projects working on Web privacy measures
| since the Junkbuster days in the 1990s.
|
| Pretty much any practical measures I've thought of, I think of
| (usually obvious) ways they can be countered, and assume it's
| only a matter of when that measure is on the adversary's radar
| and worth their time.
| userbinator wrote:
| Junkbuster --- now that's a name that takes me back! MITM
| proxies for filtering were far more common back then, but the
| "security" industry managed to scare most people out of using
| one, ironically causing them to only remain on corporate
| networks. I still use Proxomitron for this purpose.
| LightG wrote:
| "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
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