In the few short hours since I started using #Threads, #DuckDuckGo has already blocked over 200 data tracking attempts. These include things like “headphone status” and “screen density.”
I started using #Threads
Ah, I see, there’s the problem.
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People left Facebook because it got overwhelmed with their parents and grandparents, not because they ever cared about privacy.
Idk, literally everyone I know has a Facebook page. They may not use it, buts it’s there almost like a listing in a phone book.
Facebook won’t let me login to delete mine unless I send them a photo of my drivers license. Not gonna happen.
Happened to me. Had a fake profile to test some apps and when they asked for an ID, I literally sent a pic of my MIDDLE FINGER. They accepted.
Did you make sure to remove the EXIF metadata? It would be ironic if it has the image location coordinates in it.
They can get your location to various degrees of precision just from your IP address.
200 iq move by facebook, now they have the biometric reading from the nail on your middle finger
Seriously? I’ve never even given it an email I use, let alone phone number, where do they get off asking for ID?
He may also be an admin of a Facebook page. I was an admin for my job’s (an absolutely important to no one but our community company) page, and Facebook suddenly decided one day that I was a ‘high value person of interest’ , which made me a possible hacking target. The wanted all kinds of personal info, including a copy of my ID, to prove I wasn’t some hacker, or they would disable all my access. Fuck no I’m not giving you that, go ahead and disable me
Same thing was happening to me, tried again after a couple of days and it just logged in without asking anything 🤷♂️
Same here. I didn’t sign in for a few years, and next time I did, they demanded my drivers license. Why would I possibly send my ID to this shitty website? They way overestimate their importance.
The phone book was not a big tech corporation, which is why it was a suitable place to have your phone number.
It was owned by a big tech corporation, Ma Bell. And then it got broken up and there were just a bunch of smaller monopolies printing phone books.
I didnt know that… thank you, stranger.
Big tech monopolies involved in everything, im just tired of it.
One of the advantages(?) of being old is you remember all the previous times corporations have fucked us over in various ways. The phone company monopoly which turned into mini-monopolies was just one more example unfortunately. At least that one’s over now.
In the current age we don’t even have to be that old to have been screwed by big corporations more than once. I guess anyone in their 20s would have by now gone through it at least thrice.
So what you’re saying is decentralization killed the phone book so Meta is actually saving us!? /s
I know not a single one who has that. My wife uses WhatsApp and Instagram though.
Has a lot to do with age demographics and the inability for Meta to allow a person to easily delete their page. Many if not most millennials have a Facebook page, but like myself, never use it and when asked if I have a Facebook, say no even though I technically have a one I don’t log in to.
Anecdotally, most of the people I know over the age of 45 have a Facebook and use it regularly. I don’t know very many zoomers, but the few sub-30 year olds I do know, never even made a Facebook account, but do use Instagram.
I had a person that hated me in high school create a FB page that said I graduated from Harvard and worked at a gay bar with a picture she sneakily took like a creep. Idiots believed it was my FB page and asked why I wasn’t accepting their friend requests. Not sure if the page still exists, I had family ask to try and take it down but I don’t use Facebook to know if anything happened.
Well, what we learned from those tech whistleblowers was that, even those of us that never even made a FB account have a profile made of us from pictures and things people said about us on their fuckin FB accounts. This probably goes for those of us born before ‘95, but I would assume that practice is only heightened by data scraped from Android devices, the expanded access via Instagram, the leaps in tech, etc for those born after ‘95.
So buckle up, folks. It’s all bad.
They’re called shadow profiles. They were also using information from the contact information in your phonebook.
I have one haven’t used it years. But don’t delete it because of friends but now reminds me I need to delete it like asap.
I hate whatsapp, but I “have to” use it, because otherwise I would be unable to talk to 98% of my RL contacts.
I pretty much have to have some form of Meta account or else I’m considered “shady” by some people. I haven’t even logged in in years, but just saying the username is appaeently enough.
I’ve seen goddamn ads for apartments that require sharing FB/Instagram contact info.
I try to limit letting that kind of person into my life.
These people are so low info they don’t even know Facebook owns Instagram
Shit, did your phone extend a needle for a blood test?
There’s a reason it’s not allowed in the EU.
What I don’t understand is why people wound even want to use this app…
What possible appeal could it have?
Using Threads knowing it’s a product of Zuck, is like voting for Trump in 2024 cause he wore a different style suit.
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You say that, but if he went out on stage in a pink sequins suit with assless chaps because it would somehow “own the libs”, a tragically high number of people would be all over that.
The Proud Boys leader fucked a dildo to own the libs. So you’re not wrong.
Oh God I forgot about that lmao, what a fucking idiot. I wonder how many of his fellow Proud Boys tried it out too 🤣
Bro, put one up mine too! Come on man we gotta own them!
Remember kids; assless chaps don’t exist, it’s just chaps. If they had asses, they’d be pants!
As a member of the local #42069 Union of Chapless Chaps, I waggle my fingers and blow a raspberry in solidarity.
Hey, if a bloke happened to be a waist-down amputee, I’d say he’s an assless chap. They can exist.
Honestly that would make me sorta like him a bit. Especially if he did Eddie Murphy and wore a purple leather skintight outfit. Stupid sexy trump. Feels like I’m wearing nothing at all. nothing at all.
“Okay so it’s basically Twitter, but with like… Facebook features…” Is literally a joke I have made about annoying app ideas people have when you tell them you’re a software developer.
I have made this joke a few times, because it killed every time.
I’m stunned. Out of material, and stunned.
Had a dude tell me he wanted to ‘disrupt’ social media by creating a LinkedIn alternative that allowed posting videos.
He just needed a couple ‘techies’ like me to get it off the ground.
Haven’t heard from him in a while. I hope rehab worked out for him.
Your responsible for this you willed this evil into the world I cast you out to the sea and rocks below to you and your twitter with Facebook features
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If you are already eating out of a dumpster, even the worst fast food looks appetizing.
There’s a lot of dumpster divers out there, too. According to an AP article Threads “has drawn tens of millions of users since launching this week”.
That’s nuts. And depressing.
They probably funneled them in with an ad from Instagram.
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What is Dril?
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. I can’t relate to anything in that comment.
Well the majority was clearly him being facetious
Hey now, Grimace can’t feel sexy?! Let the purple monster be!
If your using facetious does it track you?
And *you’re
My phones Swype function feels horrible.
A guy on twitter who’s kinda funny.
I googled him/her/it just in case it was a leggy, smoking hot “influencer”.
Yeah no. Maybe a kind of influencer?
It will be interesting to see how quickly companies will substitute the “follow us” troika of icons on their website and brochures from a blue f, camera and blue bird to a blue f, camera and stylised black T.
I assume that printing companies will make a packet reprinting all those brochures, or selling little stickers to cover up the little blue bird.
I’d guess you have to like Twitter in the first place to understand the appeal. Some people like it, some don’t, but the Twitter format has been pretty popular over the years, and this comes at at time when Elron has been making twitter dramatically worse for anyone who doesn’t share his political views. Meta gives the appeal as “having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution”. At this point, even if I thought Elron was a great guy I sure wouldn’t invest much in building my twitter account as the future of the site seems shaky. Also though, on the other hand, who knows if this will be a success for Meta and whether they’ll still support it 3 years from now.
I do have a Twitter account but I almost never use it anymore because it has become such a cesspool…
I just don’t think another copy of that cesspool run by a different asshole is likely to really be any more interesting than the original.
I deleted my twitter account from 2009 once it was apparent what a clusterfuck Elron was going to make it. I never really used it that much until a few years ago, but I started in 2020 as it was the platform with the most recent and close to real-time news on what was going on with the riots and stuff (I was in downtown Portland when the Floyd protests started). I found a few niche communities I enjoyed and liked some of the humor accounts, like Roz Chast or NYT Pitchbot. I thought it was cool to see posts from people like Sandra Boynton. Buy yeah, no way I’m being on there in the Musk era.
I don’t have high hopes for Threads either, of course, considering I don’t like or use IG or FB and have very little respect for Meta as a company, and their weird-ass founder. The privacy concerns are horrifying - I will never install the app on my phone, so if there isn’t web access I will literally never even try it.
I did have an account, until the API changes made Twitteriffic unusable and all the people I follow left. Then I started using Reddit.
Now I use Mastodon and Lemmy. I will not go back to using a Social network that does not have; A) an open API which allows my choice of third party apps. B) a way to migrate my data and content.
The exceptions are Apple Messages (for family and close friends), SMS (for family and close friends who do t have iPhones) and Facebook under a fake name, sandboxed in FireFox Focus.
We all have our exception (s)
I’m not really sure, but then again I also didn’t really understand the point of Twitter, so I’m a bit biased.
Latest news, with spirited discussion attached
I always say: Almost like Reddit, but instead of following topics, you follow idiots
Edit: I should add that reddit is now down the drain, that’s why I’m here now, lol. Federated Internet for the win!
Social media fomo
the sad truth seems to be that vast majority of people just don’t care about the threats.
There is a percentage of people who are fucking weird bro.
Yeah, about 9 out of 10.
Hate to be in that 1 or of 10 group, they’re weird.
Umm… That’s a fraction, not a percentage… /S
Even if you don’t have Threads app installed. Meta is still a privacy threat for fediverse users. If there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta. And there are already millions of people who joined Threads in just a day.
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
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It works, unlike this place.
That tracks about everything it possibly can just for the sake of it. I despise Meta so much…
The list is just a list.
The VPN just blocked requests to Facebook domains and it says that it might have contained that data. But it has no idea what data was inside. Maybe was filled with tracking or maybe it was just requesting something else
I mean here is a screenshot of the data the Threads iOS app collects:
This checks literally every vector the app could collect data from.
I am also trying DDG app tracker out. This is what I got after opening Simcity Buildit. Not really surprised, because Fuck EA, but some of the requests might be the linking of account. Still, 930-- damnnnnn.
Not sure why anyone would install that garbage. Even a one off install to check it out means it will upload lots of data.
Some people simply do not care.
Is it really that hard to understand that some people like the idea of participating in a community with all their friends and favorite content creators, and find the idea of getting access to this for free at the cost of some privacy that they don’t hugely value to be an acceptable enough trade?
“some” privacy lol
Zoomers don’t value privacy at all, and that’s a huge problem.
Maybe, but ultimately, that’s a decision that every person gets to make for themselves.
the same reason why people are not using adblockers in current year
It’s easy to missjudge how much of our society are just mindless drones.
At this point I think it would be more informative to simply display the data they don’t collect. My guess is “nothing”.
Thank you EU!
“They “trust me”. Dumb fucks.” - Mark Zuckerberg c. early 2000s: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg#2000’s
Why anyone would try a ‘new’ Facebook product at this point is mind boggling.
Holy crap are you kidding? Mastodon IIRC requires zero priviliges/personal information to run.
Also, what the hell does it need “headphone status” for?
Bluetooth headphones have unique identifying information. Another data point for apps that the headphone jack doesn’t provide.
Honestly not defending them because the android app can potentially track your credit score, but this is probably to pause videos when headphones unplug and perform similar actions.
But it seems like DuckDuckGo is blocking them, which implies the system that’s tracking that is trying to upload that data onto a server, not just using it for pausing videos and stuff.
Right, it wouldn’t need to communicate to corporate, just to the app itself.
You both are probably right I forgot this was the android app. Meta has a habit of sending everything they could possibly ever get incase someone wants to buy it. Although I could see them using that for BI purposes to be like X Users were wearing headphones on these types of posts, but that may be giving them too much credit.
No - DuckDuckGo blocks the app from getting the data. It doesn’t know if that particular data is being sent over the internet or not. Seeing headphone status in its list just means the app tried to check the headphone status, not that it tried to send it anywhere.
Determine if you’re a candidate for headphone ads.
Could just be another piece of data that can build a more unique fingerprint for you.
A lot of that stuff is pretty standard if you’re doing logging and metrics on your service (which you should if you want to resolve outages). From the IP address and user agent you get rough location, os info, and network info. A few other things can be used for optimization (faster load times), and a Meta-scale, I wouldn’t be surprised if they do that.
That’s insane, well I know one thing. This is making me want to go download the DuckDuckGo browser.
🦆
In the same week switching to DDG browser and to Lemmy. God dayum I wish there was a good alternative for Gmail.
Protonmail is pretty great!
I tried Proton but it’s so limited. Fastmail is much better, has free email addresses for masking, and a good (searchable) calendar.
I switched to protonmail. It’s especially good if you have your own domain name like firstname@lastname.com because you can tie that to your protonmail account.
I like it a lot so far.
Shill🤖
Wow, first time being called a shill 😂 Guess there’s a first time for everything 🤷🏾♂️
What’s your preferred private search engine?
A public Searxng instance is a great way to get some privacy back. We can run searches against multiple engines and settings stay in the local browser. Image searches can be proxied as well if the particular instance allows for it.
Enjoy!
Personally, I just found out about the Brave one. Giving that a try and it seems pretty good so far. Has an AI summarize at the top of the results which worked pretty well when I searched for a news item an hour ago.
Why in the first place do you want to use that garbage?
Agreed.
This is why I use Privacy Badger
Not only does it show you what and where it blocks, but you can also whitelist blocking in case you play browser games.
If you have an android phone, take a look at TrackerControl. It’s not on the play store, you get it from F-Droid. It even caught DDG sneaking in some trackers. It’s FOSS
Just installed it, thanks. Looks good!
Absolutely, enjoy and spread the word, please. Hope the dev gets some support.
Cant get it to work alongside my vpn.
Oh yeah, it is either VPN or the app unfortunately
How is this compared to Blokada?
Blockada blocks mostly ads, right? This blocks everything that is not good. Lol. Try it and see. Sometimes it’s so aggressive that some apps/sites don’t work. But I freaking love it. I also use an app called URL check that checks every URL you click on them gives you the option to choose what app to launch it with and also to remove any suspicious links/trackers in the link
Holy crap, TrackControl is really good and informative! Scary to see which companies try to gather your information! Thanks for this. I thought Blokada was the best. Going to try out URLCheck as well. Any other privacy apps for Android or even for Windows hit me up!
Glad you’ve found them useful. Please spread the word so more people can benefit and the devs could hopefully get done donations :)
Also, not sure if you know about newpipe sponsor block app for YouTube, revanced manager to patch apps like YouTube to block ads, sponsor block and all that. Also, search for xmanager that disables ads on Spotify. All legal stuff, btw.
Yeah, i’ve been using Revanced. Thanks!
You’re welcome. :)
Can’t find it. Is it under a different name in f droid?
Edit: found it. Thank you
Good rec, thanks!
You’re welcome
I’ve been using blokada 5 for quite a while and it seems pretty good although it’s recently switched to a subscription service in version 6 (you can still use 5 for free)
I might look into Trackercontrol instead, thanks!
I’ve been using Chrome with Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin for eons, now. Listening to youtube playlists without getting interrupted by ads is a real treat…
You’d LOVE Sponsor Block then.
It uses AI to cut out all sponsorships from within YouTube videos. Anything AI misses, the users can cut out.
So no more Raid Shadow Legends or Nord VPN interruptions. Just pure entertainment!
Is it AI based? I thought people add their own time segments with a label. I know I can turn the feature on to do that using Revanced.
I thought it was 100% human based. Never heard of any AI involved in it until today.
It’s AI based, but humans can put in the segments too.
It’s not AI based whatsoever and is entirely crowdsourced by users creating the segments. Not sure where you got the idea AI has any part in it other than a purely blind assumption that you’re now spreading as fact.
…a purely blind assumption that you’re now spreading as fact.
Hey, let’s not dismiss this technique out of hand. Sometimes, it helps people get elected President!
squints …that sounds annoying. I honestly don’t mind sponsors. It’s a simple way for content creators to make money. I just ignore or skip.
You literally don’t notice it. That’s the point.
It’s like it cuts it out using a scalpel
You get weeks of your life back from one add-on.
Yup, just checked Revanced and it’s showing 851 segments totaling 8hr 31 mins saved.
Nice addon, I’ve just installed it.
Holy shit. I’d ask how the fuck is this even legal, but seeing EU’s reaction I guess it really kinda isn’t
Social media is a tool of state surveillance and manipulation. Why wouldn’t it be legal?
