Saturday, May 28, 2016

Facebook Is Now Tracking You Even If You Don't Have An Account To Target You With Advertising

Because I haven't said it yet today anyway,


Rotten sonsabitches.

Now though, they are really going to piss a LOT of people off.


Facebook will now track you even if you're not a Facebook user


It's official: there's nowhere to hide.
Companies like Facebook and Google are happy to offer you their services for free, but free always has a cost on the internet. Advertising pays the bills, and these big companies separate themselves from the pack by serving up ads that are better targeted than other networks. How do they target so well? By tracking you as you make your way across the web and building a profile that helps determine which ads you're most likely to click.
Some people don't want to be tracked by Facebook, so they don't register an account with the site. But thanks to some major changes rolling out now, on one will be able to hide from Facebook tracking.
Oh yes, there is a way and we will get to that shortly.

As The Wall Street Journal noted on Friday morning, Facebook's off-site ads will now be shown to people who are not registered Facebook users. That also means webgoers without Facebook accounts will now be tracked by Facebook so that the ads they're served will be better targeted to their tastes.
By altering the code websites use to display Facebook widgets such as "Like" buttons, Facebook can track a user across most or even all of the web pages he or she visits. That information is then stored and analyzed by Facebook so that advertisements served by Audience Network partners are more likely to be relevant to these users.
"Our buttons and plugins send over basic information about users' browsing sessions. For non-Facebook members, previously we didn't use it. Now we'll use it to better understand how to target those people," Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Facebook's ads and business platform, told WSJ.

As The Wall Street Journal noted on Friday morning, Facebook's off-site ads will now be shown to people who are not registered Facebook users. That also means webgoers without Facebook accounts will now be tracked by Facebook so that the ads they're served will be better targeted to their tastes.
By altering the code websites use to display Facebook widgets such as "Like" buttons, Facebook can track a user across most or even all of the web pages he or she visits. That information is then stored and analyzed by Facebook so that advertisements served by Audience Network partners are more likely to be relevant to these users. 

Now then, the article goes on and gives you a link to another article that explains VPN's a bit and has a couple links to some free ones.

The Opera web browser has one built right in.

There is a link there also to get a free, unlimited use VPN, to use for Google's Chrome.

One that I was using with the Pale Moon browser is called Ghostery

Pale Moon is an off shoot of Firefox and works very similar.

I used it for a long time, right up until tonight as a matter of fact.

Something went haywire with it though and it kept going unresponsive on me constantly for the last few weeks so I am using Chrome right at the moment, it was the default browser in this Laptop when I got it.

I'm real leery about stuff associated with Google anymore though.
As you probably know, Google has been reading all your Emails and watching your web browsing for years now and targeting advertisements at you from their contents.

They are all turning into stalkers but this advertising bullshit has gotten completely out of hand in my opinion.

Let my give you fuckers at Google and Facebook a little perspective from my side of the screen.

I work for a living, hard, physical labor.

When I get online to check the news, maybe watch a couple videos or listen to some music, I DO NOT WANT TO GET BOMBARDED WITH ADVERTISING CONSTANTLY.

I want to relax!

It's gotten so bad that even if you "X" out of some fucking autoplay pop up advertisement so you can see what the hell you went there to see in the first place, another one pops right the fuck up unbidden behind it!

You wind up spending your time dodging advertisements and not seeing what it was you wanted in the first place. And some of these ads these days are a real pain in the ass to figure out how to get rid of  too.

YouTube is really bad about this. Their fucking ads actually block what you are trying to watch at the bottom and when you close the damn thing, another one pops right the fuck back up again!

As with everything else in this world, this overreach is going to have repercussions.
This just might blow up in their facebooks.

People are funny about things and this just may be the thing that starts a counter movement to shut a bunch of this stuff right back off.
It didn't used to be this way but money talks and if there is one thin dime out there gathering dust in someones pocket, these people want it.



5 comments:

GOODSTUFF said...

people tend to forget that Facebook and Google are basically data mining companies

gun monkey said...

Download Firefox and the get the add-ons AdBlock Plus and Disconnect. With Firefox and these add-ons, I don't see any ads on Facebook or You-Tube. They block most stuff very effectively so much in fact certain websites will block you for using them on their website. Are you still being tracked, yep but I'm not making it easy for the data miners.

SiGraybeard said...

I use a Hosts file in Windoze. Windows has a file that lives deep in the windows directories called Hosts that can be used to supply a list of places never to allow connections to. This place has the most common one: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

When you get it in place it blocks the vast majority of ads. When you start seeing them again, it's time to check for an update.

The only down side is that it's a bit over aggressive, so sometimes good places use the servers that the Hosts file blocks. Sometimes you may miss something you'd really like to see.

Phil said...

Thank you for that!

Selous Scout said...

I use Firefox with the add-ons NoScript and adblock plus. Keeps it all under control with a little tuning.

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