Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

Re:Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Cont... by mattlondon on Thursday September 27, 2018 @07:13AM (#18083431)

Thanks for the info - didn't think of this angle (i.e. advertising sending a list of numbers to target, and facebook tying that to their cookie ID they have on you). There I was wondering how this works in a browser since browsers don't know your phones number (right?).

> Would you rather use Netflix or Spotify without recommendation engine?

100% yes.

Personally for me the term "personalisation" is becoming a dirty word and I am becoming uneasy when I hear it mentioned in design docs and product launches etc. I dont want to see what some algorithm thinks I want to see. Instead I would prefer to see the real, unfiltered, unfettered data. I think the whole Fake News outcry started me thinking about it in a more deep way.

Imagine if you went into a fancy restaurant for some special occasion and the waiter took a look at you as you walked in and brought you a "special" menu based on some decision they made silently in their own head about what they think you want. Rightly you'd want to see the full menu and not just what they think you want to see. Sure I'd welcome them pointing out some highlights on the menu, but I'd apprecaite seeing the whole thing before making up my own mind.

As a result now I use DuckDuckGo exclusively and have Firefox set up with Google Container[1] to keep the Google cookies separate from everything else (I dont use facebook at all so their cookies are entirely blocked as 3rd party) as well as the usual uBlock Origin, privacy badger et al. I am even toying with the idea of moving away from my gmail that I've been using since 2004/05.

1 - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Cont... by 394549 on Thursday September 27, 2018 @02:16PM (#18087227)

> Personally for me the term "personalisation" is becoming a dirty word and I am becoming uneasy when I hear it mentioned in design docs and product launches etc. I dont want to see what some algorithm thinks I want to see. Instead I would prefer to see the real, unfiltered, unfettered data. I think the whole Fake News outcry started me thinking about it in a more deep way.

That's also a corruption of the meaning of "personalisation." Personalisation is about me making choices to adapt a product to my preferences, it's not about the product making choices about how to interact with me.

Real personalisation would be having the (sticky) option to shut the algorithm off and "see the real, unfiltered, unfettered data."

[ Parent | on HN ]