What Facebook Knows About You

[yogi]

Anybody who has read more than a few of my posts littered about the Internet knows I've long been an anti-Facebook kind of guy. While there may be several reasons for my negative views, the one I've complained about most is their spying on my private life and selling what they know to those who would pay for such information. That's just the way the business is run, but they never made a big effort to ask me if it's all OK with me. Well, they do explain it all in their Terms Of Service (TOS), but who reads that? Anyway, I found an article that addresses the wildly popular belief that Facebook listens in to everything you say within range of your phone's (or other mobile device's) microphone. It sounds plausible and they would have good reason to do it. But do they really???

Read this article to be enlightened about how Facebook actually goes about their business of using it's members as a commodity. It's not as bad as you thought. It's probably worse.

https://lifehacker.com/facebook-isn-t-r ... 1820193946

[pilvikki]

thanks!
i really don't care what they know, but what i do care about is that they feel it's their birthright to know... and lie about it. ok, fine, it's their site, but it's also every else's, but they're getting filthy rich on it.
so, tomorrow i'll go through that list and tweak my permissions to "screw you!".

[Kellemora]

I keep everything turned off, and do not have a microphone connected to any of my computers.
I also use ad blockers, and cookie blockers.
Even though I do all of this, if I'm looking on-line for information about something, I will get ads about those things in the side bar I don't have blocked.
Because I am a writer, I may search for some things relevant to the story I'm working on. It sure causes some strange ads to appear, hi hi...

I do think Farcebook analyzes our text posts, especially the private group posts not shared on the news feed.
I had mentioned to a friend about having to learn all the ICC Classes when I was driving OTR.
I was also driving during the time the governing body changed from ICC to FMCSA, around 1980 I think.
We had to change the numbers on our trucks from ICC 00000000 to FMCSA 00000000
And only a couple of years later, maybe five years later, they were changed to USDOT 00000000
This is about the time I quit driving OTR. Probably a good thing too, because I never could remember the new class names or numbers for the products I was hauling. I would rattle off the ICC classification, and the young inspectors would just stare at you like what the H are you talking about.

After this exchange of several posts, I started getting all kinds of ads for everything from OTR driving schools to Tractor-Trailer Sales and Service. Now why would Farcebook send a 70 year old man info about OTR driving schools?
What prompted them? My only mention of it on-line ever was in a private group post. Hmmm....

[pilvikki]

i think FB is like a ...net; it hauls in everything and then starts to hand it out back to the sender.
i could never order boots off the net, yet got months of boot ads when i'd discussed purchase of same with someone. i also discussed diapers and got swamped with adult diaper ads. not yet, not yet, damn it!

[yogi]

Google used to have ads that oddly enough corresponded to the content of your e-mail. They did that for many years but have since stopped. I'm pretty sure Facebook is doing what Google did, i.e., machine scanning content and fetching the appropriate ads to go with it. It's not just content that Facebook scans. They also have a profile of you, your friends, and all your interests to which they refer when targeting you with ads. That's the part that gets creepy and explains why you and I see different ads while taking about the same subject.

[Kellemora]

The frau uses Yahoo web-mail, and she knows they search her mail for keywords because she will sometimes use a word for something as a Gotcha, hi hi...
She wrote something to her niece and in the middle of the message she wrote Baby Crib.
Her niece sent another message back to her, "what you mean by Baby Crib? I'm not pregnant!"
Then both of them started getting ads for Baby Cribs, Beds, Strollers, and Formula, hi hi...

My brother lives on his yacht. Every once in awhile I'll ask him how the renovations are going on his boat.
Within a day or two, I'll start getting ads for boat covers or something to do with boats.
So I know they glean our e-mails if they go to a web-mail service like G-mail or Y-mail.

[pilvikki]

it's kinda funny that google fishes for ads, while gmail has a pretty good filtering system that siphons out 99.9% of the junk...

[yogi]

Just because you don't see ads, don't assume Google is not watching you. It's kind of freaky in a way. They have a personal profile for everybody that ever touched anything to do with Google. If a government did such a thing, there would be a revolution.

[Kellemora]

What makes you think the government doesn't, hi hi...

[yogi]

I'm not so naive as to think the government is not tracking me. However, I also think Google knows more about me than the Federales.

[pilvikki]

you tube has started harassing me with this idiotic 'our permissions/security/i don't what' has changed and you need to review them at once. well, chuck you, farley, i did that last time you told me to do that. and that last time i killed the the cookies and other snacks..



btw, thanks to my new and improved "security", i can't View more smilies. just get a black box...

can't bloody well win.

[Kellemora]

I have something interesting that just happened between yesterday and today.
My wife and I have been looking at purchasing a new recumbent bike to replace our old upright model.
The price range of those we were looking at was between 119 and 269 dollars.
We liked the features of one that was 258 dollars, so I began hunting around at prices on that particular model.
Everywhere we looked, the price was between 258 and 269 for that model.
Sometimes hunting for prices does something good, we found a mfgr. coupon code.
The mfgr. who sent us the coupon code told us to use it at Amazon to get the best price and free shipping.
WalMart would also accept the coupon for an in-store pick-up, but with the coupon, the price was still 185 bucks, while at Amazon, after we got to the final check-out, the end price was 177.88 which was great.

TODAY I just ran through the websites I checked yesterday before I ordered the bike.
GUESS WHAT! Today the bike is 178 dollars on every website I checked yesterday that ranged between 258 and 269.
Do you think that was already in the works, or do the websites all copy each others prices?
I just thought it strange the day after I placed the order, they all had the same much lower price.

[yogi]

I think I have a fair understanding of how things work on the internet. As mentioned above I am also aware of a profile that is more or less shared by a few advertising organizations who keep track of me and my interests. However, the last time I built a computer from scratch, something inexplicable happened. I forgot exactly what item I was hunting for, but I think it was a power supply, or perhaps a video board. After doing some due diligence research I came up with an exact model number for what I wanted. At that point it was only a matter of finding who sold it for the best price. I ended up on Newegg.com and got the best price of the day. I was happy and about to order the item, but because I do research on one and buying on another I copied the URL from Foxfire and pasted it into Opera. The item came up and was exactly the same in both browsers EXCEPT FOR THE PRICE. It was a lot cheaper on the Opera browser. I checked and rechecked, but everything was identical except the price, and the browser, of course.

I happen to know each browser sends out what is known as a 'User Agent' string to the servers it queries. That string is just a bunch of information about the browser so that the server knows what to send out for the page to render properly. Fair enough. I also know that the User Agent (along with a few other things) is used by many places to uniquely identify the person doing the browsing. All I can conclude is that Newegg figured that I was two different people and each one got a different price. I ordered the the cheapest price without incident. Stunned by the variance that I saw, I tried the same trick the next day. The prices were identical and at the higher level.

I have yet to come up with a good explanation.

[Kellemora]

I mentioned this to my brother on the phone yesterday, and he has found the same thing himself.
He was hunting for a an old-style bumper pool table for their clubhouse.
The lowest price he found was like 599 buck and up.
The very next day he went looking again, and Amazon cut the price to 389.
He checked other websites and they were now 389 also, some were still 499 but that's 100 bucks less.
He waited another day and the prices were back up again, until after he ran through the same searches he did the day before.
The day after that, another search to Amazon and it was now 389 again, so he ordered it.
He didn't check after he ordered it to see if the other websites came back down to match it or not.

At least I learned something from all this. If I want to buy something, check a lot of places, but don't buy until the next day, when they drop the price down further.

[pilvikki]

well, i'll keep this mind!

[yogi]

The incident I'm talking about is slightly more weird than prices across the board changing over night. I looked up the same item from the same supplier (exactly identical URLs) and found a difference in price depending on the browser I used. I recall even printing out the two and was prepared to make a case with Newegg if they gave me a hard time. My theory is based on my suspicion that the prices shown are derived from my "internet profile" for lack of a better name. Firefox was a well known version of Yogi and everybody knew what that guy was willing to pay. The Yogi on the Opera browser, however, was either new or did not have enough information in his profile so that Newegg was prepared to entice a new customer into the fold. It's a lot like those customer retention teams you run into when you try to cancel a service or a subscription. All of a sudden some remarkable bargain prices become available when you threaten to stop buying whatever is being sold.

[pilvikki]

so it gets more and more complicated...

once upon a time i used to have a boss, in the 80's, and he'd call his wife to toddle over to the bank and take money out of accounts X and Z, deposit it into account Y, before 3 o'clock. or something like that.

i bet they're wealthy now, but also, what kind of hoops would he be jumping now....?

meanwhile, i had my mortgage payment bounce because i was short 57 c. yep, 57 cents. this was before overdraft and stuff.

[Kellemora]

To test out what you mentioned Yogi - I started looking at the easy-change weight sets.
I using Google I found the same weight sets at four different place, each with separate prices and wrote them down.
Then I switched to Firefox, and Opera. Only one place showed a different price when I was on Opera, so I went back to Google again, and it was now the same price as I saw on Opera.
Later on today, I will hit all the same ones again to see if they lowered the prices on any.

[yogi]

Based on your experience and mine, Opera seems to be the culprit that attracts low prices. I may have to change my mind about what to use for a default browser. LOL

[pilvikki]

daughter chimes in that, ay least in the travel industry, those using macs are quoted higher prices.