A facebook employee explained me how tracking works. Its not the email address Meta is concerned about. Its the IP, device identifiers and location. Meta doesnt care about the email at all apart from sending you emails for notification. Even with a fake email they exactly know who you are. Let's say you visit CNN.com which has facebook tracker. Facebook has the IP and the device identifiers. Now you login with fake email account on Instagram, facebook knows that's the IP ans the same device hence it "must" be the same person That's how facebook creates shadow profiles.
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Its not the email address Meta is concerned about. Its the IP, device identifiers and location.
This actually applies to the entire internet, look into fingerprinting. This website checks how susceptible you are to it: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
Mullvad's website has this nice widget that checks if your ip address can be found by dns too. Good for busting competitors
That site says "Your browser has a unique fingerprint" even though I run Firefox, uBlock, Privacy Badger, and have privacy.resistFingerprinting set to true. My main problem may be plugins, once you have more than a few your set can be pretty unique.
It's almost impossible not to have a unique fingerprint online with how stuff is tracked. Websites are tracking user agents, screen resolution, your GPU/web graphics renderer, etc.
The only way is to disable JavaScript, but good luck to using the internet without it
Never heard about Tor Browser? Nice "privacy" community you've got here.
Iirc unique == identifiable necessarily, because your fingerprint might be different while still unique the next time around.
Firefox has containers that allows you to seperate all websites in categories where they can't reach anything outside of it.
There's a special one for Facebook
There are still...I dunno...probably DNS hops, IP, time's of day, browser window size, browser user agent...
And if you access any page with any similar parameters on your phone or another household device on any site with FB tracking, it's over.
It looks like in the last 7 days my phone has cutoff over 150,000 different tracking attempts and that's just catchable ones and on my phone.
I don't use Facebook but I'm 100% sure they have my data.
A lot of apps that uses Facebook login, debugger, React Native, etc. allows it to collect as much user data as it can and send it to FB servers because that's the default.
I dont have facebook, and I explicitly tell family not to put my pictures on their facebook pages or mention me at all.
I'm still 100% convinced facebook has my biometric data, my home address, and what I ate for dinner last week.
The amount of data they collect is insane, and intrusive.
Every time it comes up, i'm reminded of a sex worker who was doxed by facebook because she in a parking lot that a former client was in, and it had used proximity data and shit to link her Sex Work Phone/Facebook Account, to her real Phone/Facebook account, which was then given to the client as a suggested contact.
I’m pretty sure React/React Native doesn’t have any Facebook tracking built in. The dev community would crucify them for that.
Obviously. Device fingerprinting is much, much more advanced than that. IP, device screen resolution and type, etc. And that's just the basics
Preaching to the choir but good to remind some people. Thats why you avoid or limit use of those services. Use tor or a VPN and use multiple layers of blocking such as DNS and in browser blocking. Also foss only applications where possible.
Proton VPN is free and there is also riseup VPN. I run a tor node so I can at least vouch for that one 🙂. The more people that use it and run nodes the more it normalizes it. You can also use onion repos in your distro if supported. I know Debian had had then for a few years now and it uses the apt-transport-tor package.
A tor node or relay is just someone running and configuring tor on their server to accept and forward connections to the tor network being part of the chain. Normally a chain has three nodes: an entry , a middle and an exit.
Onion repos are software repositories in this case for the Debian Linux operating system that contain firmware and package updates and are hosted as onion services accessible over tor.
This is why I always use a VPN. Yes I know it's not a magic bullet for privacy but saying "you don't need a VPN" is also a lie
Using a VPN does exactly nothing against cookies or device fingerprinting.
I never said it does. But it does prevent your IP from being used as a unique identifier. I have a hardened Firefox browser to prevent cookies and device fingerprinting but an IP address is just another form of fingerprinting and approximate location data that using a VPN hides.
I am using Firefox, and with a shit-load of add-ons that supposedly prevent unwanted cookies and fingerprinting. I use a VPN.
I was permanently banned from Reddit (for advocating firebombing nazis, as if that's a bad thing). When I logged in to an alternate account, that account was also permanently banned. Any account I tried to create after that point ended up being banned within a week, regardless of whether or not I was using it. I checked online. Apparently this has become fairly common in the last 2-3 years.
While you can minimize your digital fingerprint, it's almost impossible to prevent all digital fingerprinting. The EFF says that I have very strong protection against digital fingerprinting, but I'm still identifiable to a company with sufficient resources to devote to the task.
All you have to do to avoid reddit perma bans is to log in on a browser without cookies, on a VPN, and that's it. If you're still getting permabanned instantly on new accounts you're doing something wrong. Maybe you're using a VPN address that has been banned, idk. I ban evaded multiple accounts for years and only stopped because after I moved my IP changed and I don't need to fuck with the VPN anymore
The main thing is you'll be shadowbanned probably and you'll have to fuck around with getting karma and begging the admins to un-shadow ban you if your posts don't show up
I've been using a VPN for several years. I've tried using every major browser except Mulvad and Librewolf. As far as I can tell, they're doing some form of digital fingerprinting that I can't block. My only option would be getting an entirely new computer. I went through and overwrote/deleted 15 years of comment history (but have not deleted accounts), it's just not worth it to me.
firstly, you can choose a good VPN provider like Mullvad or iVPN. Secondly, even if the VPN company had all your data, it is not much worse if worse at all than your ISP having your data, and at least you have an IP address that is not actually yours.
People who argue VPNs are useless are just plain naive. Yes VPNs are over hyped by youtube sponsorships its not gonna keep you protected from a hacker that gets access to your bank accounts password, but it will improve privacy by a bit.
There is no such thing as a "good VPN provider". VPNs were not created for privacy. They exist to allow individual users and groups to network together in enterprise environments
If you want more security use i2p or tor
And FF containers are still no match for advanced fingerprinting.
The only way to protect against advanced fingerprinting is to use the TOR Browser or Mullvad Browser, to blend in with everyone else who shares the exact same fingerprint using those tools. The best you can do outside of those is to protect against less advanced scripts.
that is much more complex for normal people but yeah. tor can be slow as shit especially.
Tor is also not recommended for streaming since the p2p connection bypasses the Tor network
you can use firefox containers with container proxy to have different ips on each container. that said i run wireguard on my router itself so all the devices are behind vpn.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-proxy/
as for location, changing ip also changes your geolocation. there is also the location reported by your browser which you can change in about:config but this isn't provided unless you give permission to the site asking it.
as for device info, each container is like having a separate firefox install. all the cookies are separated and isolated.
Meta applies a myriad of advanced and complicated tracking methods. Email is a very popular and easy one. I believe the one you're referring to is called a tracking pixel.
For example, some browsers block tracking Pixels, but if you're logged into Amazon with an email address that Meta knows, they will sell your shopping habits to Meta to show you ads.
And people dont share devices?
I have a family pc in the living room. We all use it.
Im not on facebook though.
There's got to be more metadata involved in fingerprinting. The type of content you're looking at. Maybe even deriving some sort of signature from your mouse movements.
While browser containers won’t work since you’re using the same IP anyway, blocking the trackers themselves would be more effective. DNS blocking, uBlock, and Privacy Badger can help block fb trackers on websites. So fb knows your ip, but at least they can’t track you across other sites.
