Re:Facebook Wanted Gizmodo to Kill Investigative Tool
by beagle3 on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @03:28PM
(#17709759)
Did you ever log in to FB with your own account on that machine? If you did, they leave a cookie there; even if no cookie, perhaps they used canvas fingerprinting (It's frightening how many websites do -- there's an about:config setting in Firefox that would let you know and block that).
Did you have your phone with you, with the FB app? If you did, they likely have your exact location, and possibly also the exact location of the browser.
A false positive costs them essentially nothing; So they'll always offer the 50-or so highest scoring matches to you. It's possible that those were matched to you because you had just logged out from the same public IP 5 minutes before (even if it was another machine on the network), and there were no other sources of information about that fake account.
It is creepy. It should be illegal, but unforunately, it's legal -- and the governments are happy about it because it's often illegal for THEM to collect all this data, but it's not illegal to let FB collect it and ask them for a copy.
Did you have your phone with you, with the FB app? If you did, they likely have your exact location, and possibly also the exact location of the browser.
A false positive costs them essentially nothing; So they'll always offer the 50-or so highest scoring matches to you. It's possible that those were matched to you because you had just logged out from the same public IP 5 minutes before (even if it was another machine on the network), and there were no other sources of information about that fake account.
It is creepy. It should be illegal, but unforunately, it's legal -- and the governments are happy about it because it's often illegal for THEM to collect all this data, but it's not illegal to let FB collect it and ask them for a copy.