There is this common narrative I see all the time, implying that we as individuals are empowered to choose and manifest our own destiny, and this comes up often in privacy discussions.

Don’t like Facebook’s privacy nightmares? Just don’t use Facebook!

Don’t like personalized ads? I remember a popular post on reddit saying “if your ad interrupts my YouTube video, I will hate your product”.

Don’t like Google chrome hegemony? Just use Firefox!

And while I agree that we should strive to do that, the battle doesn’t end here. Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up. Google chrome keeps it’s hegemony despite people on the Internet advocating Firefox day and night. And ads continue to be extremely profitable despite you “hating the product” because it interrupted your YouTube video.

Even worse: even if you “hate the product”, you now already know it. You now know they product exists, and possibly whatever they wanted you to know about it. The reality is that these companies own your eyes. They control what shows up on your screen. And even if you hate it, they control what you end up learning.

the reality is that our individual resistance is very far from enough

I am not saying it is completely futile. It is a step in the right direction. But the only effective solution is organized action. We, alone, cannot achieve much. Unless we organize our resistance against privacy violations, we will continue to live through this privacy nightmare.

  • @[email protected]
    14•7 months ago

    Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up.

    Can someone please explain how they are doing this?

    1. Use Adblocker
    2. Use DNS filter
    3. DoH to prevent MiTM/use your own resolver in Unbound.
    4. I’m still trying to look up how to prevent ISPs from logging my SNI Well, it seems Cloudflare and other domain service providers have implemented ESNI.
    • @emptyother
      32•9 months ago

      Friends, family, and even people you briefly meet, rat you out. Often without them even knowing by sharing their list of phone contacts.

      • @[email protected]
        3•9 months ago

        And what happens when you change your phone number? Does that become a new shadow profile? What of they change your name in their contact list? I’m trying to gauge how Facebook handles the inconsistencies of navigating contacts who don’t have Facebook accounts

        • @[email protected]English
          5•9 months ago

          We can only guess. But they can probably detect contacts for which the phone number is updated or which have several assigned phone numbers.

          • Joël de Bruijn
            2•9 months ago

            Also all Android / iOS apps with Facebook and Google trackers in them share device info and data easy to correlate, icw sites having FB pixels also.

        • @[email protected]
          4•9 months ago

          They do more than just the phone number and name. https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-profiles-and-should-you-be-worried/

          It talks about the use of photos, people mentioning you in a post, etc. Sure, facetook publicly said they would be backing off of visual recognition, but how much do you really trust that company to do jack-diddly if there is potential profit? Anyway. If you change your phone number, but the same group of people still have you in a ‘field of contacts,’ their tools can almost certainly fit those puzzle pieces together. Same if you change the phone number. Identifying people is easy if you have metadata.