Re:Facebook announces Clear History feature
by chrischen on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @02:09PM
(#16969662)
If people use it en-masse, probably negatively, but most likely they're betting few people will use it, just like how few people (almost no one I know) 100% go through with account deletion. The reality is there is no compromise for privacy. They build tools that help you either lose all value from facebook and retain your privacy, or relinquish your privacy to continue using facebook. It's not so much privacy forward tooling as it is a constant reminder they have a gun to your head.
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Re:Facebook announces Clear History feature
by BlackFly on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @03:52AM
(#16974945)
Well, GDPR makes forces them to make the tracking features opt in, so they have to collectively convince EU users to turn on the tracking as opposed to hoping the people won't disable it.
They do this through a few devious practices, such as the spin doctoring discussed here. One other thing that they do is instead of the option being a check box, it is a selection between two radio buttons and you explicitly have to choose one of them. I suppose this is actually a violation of the GDPR, since it should be disabled by default.
You don't lose value from facebook at all by not opting in. "Show ads that are relevant to me," is an arrogant statement. The actual statement is "Track my browsing to show ads that Facebook believes are relevant to me." I don't use Facebook for the targeted ads, I use it to infrequently receive news about people I know spread out across the globe.