I've used a similar add-on for Google search (the add-on made some human-like Google searches in the background), but I can't remember its name now.
Facebook would be a pointless exercise, since the <div> names are automatically generated. You can't even hide the sidebars you never use using CSS because they'll all change their <div> IDs on refresh. That and the murkiness of what exactly is an ad on Facebook makes even the most thorough adblockers struggling to work properly even in an otherwise-ideal situation (a desktop browser with an adblocker).
Also:
> all ads are supposed to contain the word “sponsored” as part of a mandatory disclosure, so users can distinguish between ads and their friends’ posts. Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” Later, it also added an invisible “Sponsored” disclosure to posts from your friends.
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp...
A Facebook page that I'm following paying money to reach me is an ad according to Facebook. To me, that's extortion.
On the other side, we have notifications about friend suggestions. You can't turn them off in the notification settings. That to me is an "ad" for Facebook itself, even if nobody payed them money. It's an undesired content that pulls my attention away from what I came there to do in order to promote a product.
How would you fix that? The only thing I can think of would be a chronological feed where everybody sees every post.
The model they currently use serves two goals: to extort money from fanpages, and to hook users up by intermittent reinforcement.
They probably already record every item displayed on screen (and how long for, and whether my cursor hovered it, etc.) so a list of items I saw (on any device) in the chronological order I saw them should just be a simple db lookup away.
If you build a cockpit by measuring everyone's dimensions and averaging them, you'll end up with a cockpit that fits nobody[0]. I believe the same is true for feeds as well.
There's an amount of information that works for the average Facebook user. However, none of us are precisely on that average. By building algorithms whose mission is max consumption by the average user, they've made their product useless to everyone.
[0] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
Honestly, everything this company does is shady beyond all shame.
Twitter keeps fucking around with their timeline feed, but they've preserved a "chronological, show me everything" option through all of their other bad ideas.
After a few refreshes of my Twitter homepage in a short time span, I did a little research: I've edited the CSS to make the distinction of "liked" tweets more obvious. Over 50% of "fresh" content turned out to be likes by the people I follow that are in no way chronological.
You can fight it... for now, but I assume not for long. I've stopped relying on Twitter for that same reason I've stopped relying on Facebook.
Is that the name for the "recent tweet from X" notifications? Those have made Twitter notifications completely useless for me. :(
As far as I know, there's no universal term for them. Since we already associate darkness with bad UX patterns, "shadow notifications" as a subset of "dark patterns" has a nice ring to it.
We've long had the ability to set a minimum font size, but I suspect browser vendors have viewed that purely as an accessibility feature.
(Tangent: I've also been increasingly disappointed that browsers let sites make text unselectable. I understand that there was originally a use case, but I only ever encounter it as an anti-feature these days.)
Breaking up a word into multiple tags is very different from inserting invisible extraneous content into the middle of a word. The latter is what I'm questioning the usefulness of; the former I can see as occasionally useful, but should be avoided when it breaks screen readers and search engines.
Take a modal for example - the text is not visible until the modal is opened. Let's think about menus that display on hover - they wouldn't work. What about tooltips or other sorts of floating label type things? What about other text that only appears on hover, or when some action is performed?
Sure, you could wait to insert these things into the page until the last second, but it would be less performant and complexity would be higher.
If you saw what the web looked like without display: none and visibility: hidden, I think you'd change your mind. There are infinite applications.
Aside, this reminds me of the brief period of time where "hacking" SEO by pasting huge volumes of keywords in text the same color as the background and/or hidden by other page elements was a relatively common trick. Search engines simply switched to more sophisticated methods of page ranking, I wonder what change could be made remedying this which would be similarly non-disruptive outside the bad actors.
But can anyone honestly claim that putting an invisible 'sponsored' on non-sponsored posts is ethically OK? Can't we all agree that ads should be readily identifiable as such?
By human users for sure. Scripts are a whole other question.
BTW. to the extent clearly marking ads/sponsored content is required by law, I wonder whether Facebook could be sued for making this difficult for users with disabilities - after all, accessibility tools like screen readers are scripts and rely on machine-readable metadata.
I disagree entirely.
(By 3rd party ads I mean all ads that are advertising anything not directly sold or provided by the owner of the service showing that ad. That's to resolve the immediate objection of whether telling people about new features is an ad or not.)
Man can dream.
EDIT: But this man would also vote for the person pushing for such legislation.
Personally I'm stuck with voting for "the party not dismantling the NHS who stand a chance of getting in".
Maybe in my kids lifetime we'll get proper PR at the national level (UK).
...also brexit ;-)
In a world where Firefox and Safari were the major internet browsers, this wouldn't actually be that hard since it could be built into those browsers directly and would already align pretty nicely with their respective parent company ethos
Then users will blame the browser for being trash rather than FB.
What I don't know if that means browser or App. Not effective at all if most people use the app.
https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-tracking-you-even-if-you-d...
One issue is that there's data about you that's not generated by you, but by people you know (i.e. John adds me as a contact into their phone along with my birthday and address, Jane friends me on VK and keeps tagging me in pictures that have location data, etc).
I suspect that right now, companies give higher importance to data that you've entered about yourself, but once they realize you're feeding them noise, they can adjust their algorithms to trust other people's data about you (if they're not already doing that), which would significantly decrease the effectiveness of feeding them noise about yourself.
It will still work for all data points about you that can't be collected from other people (like browsing habits, your phone's location, etc)
Maybe some people can inject noise about their friends, instead.
For instance:
1. install the FB app on a phone with an address-book full of garbage and share it with the app,
2. inject fake geotag data in the photos you tag your friends in,
3. put the actual tag on strangers in the background,
4. tag your friends in stock photos, etc.
Some of these you obviously can't do with friends who don't consent, since they may get annoyed by all the fake tags, but others would be transparent to most social media users.
That said, it's pretty hard. It's not entirely clear which data points Facebook uses, but it's very likely you can't influence all of them. For example, friends adding you as contacts, or linking your profile to your phone number. If you also want to continue using it as normal, your normal usage will still give a lot of data about what you view; what you interact with; when you use it; that might stand out from the random stuff - and if you don't want to continue using it as usual, the extension will have to visit the website by itself, without interfering with your regular browsing activity, and without relying on your computer being on.
I also think that if something like this would get big enough to actually impact the quality of their algorithms, it'd be pretty easy for Facebook to detect abnormal activity.
(And of course, it's not even that much of a problem if the algorithm screws up more often, as long as advertisers believe it's accurate.)
Edit for extra nostalgia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_Know_(newsletter)
It's been done :)
Also, if your friend gives someone else information about you, do you expect that you should be able to control it? I'm pretty sure many of the details of my life appear in other people's emails, voicemails, journals, etc. that will never have a "forget me" button.
I'm mainly suggesting that there are lots of ways to improve this situation, from market forces to legislation, and it's sad to see people wasting time on things that won't work.
And since they're buying data from non-internet data brokers such as credit card companies, retailers that track you in their stores, etc., blocking the trackers and avoiding the websites doesn't actually stop the spying.
To stop them from spying on you pretty much requires that you stop engaging in large swaths of real-world society.
You can't really control what your friends are telling them about you though.
Personally, I've just about opted out of the entire internet except for work, email, and a few web sites that I read regularly. The flotsam is just too thick to be worth the bother.
Words are powerful. Normalizing terms like "data vandalism" is the road to being legally required to use FAANG in such a way that maximizes their profitability. Probably not a great idea.
I don't use Facebook/Google/etc., but they collect data about me without my consent anyway, and there is no way to delete that data or to make them stop.
That's what makes me so furious with them and all other ad companies. Since they're never going to change, I wish that they'd go out of business pretty much every day.
Edit: Found a copy of the audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU5xC00m-gA
This worked best on mainstream P2P clients like Limewire, Kazaa, Ares (all based on Gnutella I think), because the fake MP3s would propagate more widely.
It didn't work as well (or at all), on relatively obscure, community-based networks like Slsk, where people were more likely to share entire albums, and not just the singles.
I don't know if I ran into that issue, but I wasn't really downloading a lot of mainstream stuff compared to him either.
The tool would need to be something like a color picker that has a hidden command to run headerless searches in a tab of your browser.
This (sort of) worked for teenagers hiding pictures on a fake calculator app on smartphones years ago, but your mom wont try to pry at your facebook obfuscation.
Just a thought
So I think they identify this as a tough to protect weakness as well.
TrackMeNot runs as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles.
https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser. To the advertiser, it's like you suddenly disappeared.
It seems more sensible than trying to block them - instead give them loads of bad data ruining their business model?
For instance you could pick which set of noise you wanted to feed Google i.e. convince Google you are single mother from Lithuania... or Facebook you're a 63 year old man from Italy or Instagram you are a Teenager from Korea.
Every time a tracker or data point is sent to them to "know" you it could be a lie. This would lead you out of your search bubble too so political ads by Russians being bought to undermine Hillary's black vote might be more clear to everyone.
Trusting Facebook or Google to do the right thing against their financial interest won't work will it.