The people who are OK with this kind of thing -- "But nothing bad has ever happened to anyone IRL" -- are obviously not part of a minority ethnic/religious/sexual orientation/gender group. This kind of technology is already used to do harm in China. Those of us in those groups don't have the luxury of "waiting to see if the nightmare becomes real" because of some of us would be in the crosshairs, not potential bystanders.
The fact you even have to go to such lengths, and that a mainstream browser even developed such a feature is such a red flag. It's like taking Tums after ever meal. There's something wrong there, and I hope users are taking a hard look at those hoops they jump through and determining whether it's really worth it or not.
I'd love to never touch facebook again, but my 80 year old mother uses it and won't give it up because its how she stays in touch with all her friends, and I'm kind of stuck with using it to communicate with her.
I also suspect that through browser fingerprinting that facebook can track everyone across the web anyway, particularly people who run a lot of customization on their desktop (O/S, graphics card, fonts, config settings, etc) that shows up in the fingerprint. If you're visiting sites which cause you to make requests to facebook servers you're leaking information to them, even if you've deleted your facebook account (and they can probably still track who you are).
>If you're visiting sites which cause you to make requests to facebook servers you're leaking information to them, even if you've deleted your facebook account (and they can probably still track who you are).
This is an important point that raises the question of threat model.
For me, the threat is not "Facebook can track me," in the same way that my threat model doesn't include state-level actors. Because, let's be real, Facebook is as good as a state-level actor.
The threat is in showing me ads or content that modify my behavior. For this reason, I:
* Block facebook/insta at the DNS level
* Don't have a Facebook account
* Block all ads
* Block all comment sections, like buttons, etc
I know this isn't something everyone can do. I know that there are tons of people out there who find value in Facebook. I just hope they are taking steps to at least block ads and are aware of when the platform is manipulating their emotions through targeted content, and have the sense to walk away from it from time to time. Perhaps that's asking too much, but I'm not going to stop making noise about it, not going to stop telling people they need to watch what they post / look at, because I think the platform is really damaging to people's attention and mental health.
For your grandmother -- I doubt it's making her buy stuff (fixed income) and I doubt it's making her turn to rage-tweeting about politics, so it's probably OK. And you're probably OK, too, being someone in tech who knows how this shit impacts people. But everyone else? I just worry, y'know?
