this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Hello, smart people. Filling out an online form to volunteer for something, Firefox's Facebook-fence icon appeared on the email field. Confused, I clicked on its question mark. On the next page, Mozilla wanted to sell me Firefox relay for $7/mo. (That's their VPN + email masking + phone masking.) I used my yandex.ru email address instead for $0. Here's the question: is Facebook really able to track me because I've signed up to volunteer for Cornel West (setting aside the FB-Russia blockage issue)? Thanks.

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 9 months ago (18 children)

is Facebook really able to track me

Oh yes. The "like" buttons on websites are also used for tracking people, so any website that is Facebook-enabled will know who you are. Additionally, browser fingerprinting makes it difficult to stay anonymous, even without an account.

More or less, it's the worst-case scenario. Governments of many countries have sued and fined the crap out of them for obtaining data in a way that is illegal. But they make so much money with that data that they almost ignore the concern.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Given how often I have to fill in captchas, I think I'm good tbh.

Although I have firefox delete my history and cookies every time I exit a session, use ublock origin, vpn, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (4 children)

maybe... but i get captchas just from changing my user agent...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I just looked up user agent. If I understand correctly, that changes every time I change browsers. Does it also change every time I clear the cache?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

User agent has quite a few things included, such as browser and operating system, so if you use a different browser, you’ll have a different user agent. The trouble with user agent is that some techniques used to try and make it more anonymous ironically make it easier to track. There’s not really a good option. Although it’s definitely worth getting a user agent switching plugin to disguise yourself as Google bot so you can bypass paywalls

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Thanks. Magnolia does the paywall thing for me. :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Some browsers have proprietary APIs that break web standards (see Chrome), and sometimes, workarounds are needed for some browsers. Changing the user agent might break functionality.

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