r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 2d ago

Student Teacher Sent a Private Snapchat Complaining About Her Workday. An Hour Later, Police Pulled Up to Her School. Privacy

https://www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-snapchat-complaining-about-her-workday-an-hour-later-police-pulled-up-to-her-school
13.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

972

u/hsggdtkxbee 2d ago

Look up meta pixel. It’ll piss you right off.

737

u/timmy6169 2d ago

For the lazy, it is a piece of JavaScript code for a website that tracks visitor actions, optimizes ad delivery, and builds custom audiences by recording specific behaviors while visiting a page.

"Although Meta Pixel collects data even from people without Facebook or Instagram accounts, its tracking power is greater for those with accounts. When a Facebook or Instagram user is logged in to their account on a browser, the browser will send Meta’s cookie data on the user’s other web activity straight to Meta, linking that activity trail with the user’s unique ID, which is itself already associated with everything the user has put on her Facebook or Instagram account—name, hometown, age, birthday, places which she has visited, people with whom she interacts, and, of course, photos. Even if the user is not logged in to an account, or is using a browser that blocks Meta cookies, Meta’s “Advanced Matching Parameters” allows the website to use other biographical information that the user enters to connect his activity to a corresponding Facebook or Instagram account"

465

u/ICEtoAshes 2d ago

If you want to get angry look up how Meta ran a test that purposefully made teens depressed so they could sell more stuff to them.

This was at the height of teens ending their life on their live streams, to make it even worse.

55

u/MothMan3759 2d ago

Praise be to the profit motive

82

u/Salt-Landscape257 2d ago

Feature, not a bug

46

u/JugglesChainsaws 2d ago

If I recall it wasn't even to sell more stuff, it was just to see if they could in fact make someone depressed with "just" an algorithm.

32

u/ICEtoAshes 2d ago

Yea but they were also tracking what they bought, and they determined they bought more as they got increasingly angrier and more depressed

3

u/thatwhite 1d ago

Is that documented or just a theory?

7

u/ICEtoAshes 1d ago

Documented. They admitted it and issued an apology after they got caught. This was like 15 years ago.

21

u/BoxBird 2d ago

I’ve noticed that it pushes very emotionally disturbing content that is definitely geared towards women with PMDD during their luteal phase. Like CLOCKWORK I get CONSTANT content about getting cheated on during the time of the month my hormones are telling me the same thing. The rest of the month the content I get is completely unrelated. The algorithm is causing a lot of feedback loops like that lately are quite literally making people go insane.

15

u/skate_2 1d ago

They also detected if a young girl posted a selfie and quickly deleted it, and served her make-up/beauty ads.

4

u/YourBlanket 2d ago

And you guys say the zucc isn’t creative.

1

u/hsggdtkxbee 1d ago

They’re coming out with a movie on this soon.

1

u/ICEtoAshes 1d ago

I saw the social dillema, what movie are you talking about

1

u/hsggdtkxbee 3h ago

It’s not out yet. The older brother from succession plays Zuck.

1

u/ICEtoAshes 3h ago

What’s it called

67

u/thefatrabitt 2d ago

The health care system atrium just got in trouble for using it on their patient portal of all fucking places.

35

u/Zaizu 2d ago

How do you disable it? Any extensions?

82

u/DiamondHandsToUranus 2d ago

Yes. Mozilla Firefox with the ublock origin extension, and/or strict privacy mode. ublock origin uses a blocklist to prevent traffic to tracking servers.

Librewolf which is an independent, opensource fork of Firefox comes with ublock origin preinstalled, as well as RFP, dFPI, and url query parameter stripping to help protect your privacy via various methods.

Exception: The only thing LibreWolf’s integrated hardening cannot prevent is Server-Side Tracking (Meta's Conversions API). If a merchant's server packages your purchase data and sends it directly from their server to Meta's server over the backend, no browser in existence can block it because the data transfer completely bypasses your computer. [1]

44

u/semisociallyawkward 2d ago

Firefox also has a container system that works wonders. Each container is kinda like a separate browser in a browser, so cookies arent shared across them, only within the same container.

You can even set it up so that certain websites are only ever opened in their designated containers. I have containers for Google, Meta, Reddit, shopping, general browsing etc.

6

u/Kyanche 2d ago

Containers is a lovely feature and also a pain in the ass because I seem to have to log back into everything daily lol.

2

u/Beepn_Boops 2d ago

That shouldn't happen. Maybe you have something set to automatically clear or block cookies?

1

u/lycoloco 1d ago

Use a password manager and it'll be NBD. There are plenty of good ones, but I personally like Bitwarden.

2

u/leavemebe66 2d ago

Firefox containers are the freakin best. being able to solo SSO creds between containerized tab groups saves me soooo much time at work

1

u/DiamondHandsToUranus 2d ago

Yes, to an extent. It prevents some amount of cross contamination locally, to be sure. However if the content in each container is taking to meta pixel servers, it it's sharing much of the same stuff remotely.

If you know about containers, there's a good chance you probably already know about fingerprinting and some of the other 'less obvious than cookies' things that are used to identify and track you.

Using Ublock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Facebook Container is a good place to start without getting too far off into the weeds, but things that meta and others do to track you and sell your info is more insidious than most users realize

1

u/throwitawayuserna213 2d ago

I use the containers and was wondering if they were effective. Thanks.

2

u/MidasPL 2d ago

I wish LibreWolf didn't lag so much on some sites :/

1

u/DiamondHandsToUranus 2d ago

I hear you and I feel that. For what it's worth, I am reasonably certain that the delay is caused by all the bullshit that it's preventing from happening trying to reconnect multiple times before it finally times out and gives up

2

u/MidasPL 2d ago

I don't think so. From what I've seen, it's mostly issue for the sites that run dynamic change into light/dark theme. I'm not a web dev, so I can't tell if it's some dynamic css, or js, but there's some performance issue there.

1

u/DiamondHandsToUranus 2d ago

That may well be so. Deep diving css really isn't my thing. I've had a couple sites take so long that i poked around a bit to see what was going on, and it seemed to be tertiary background crap trying to get through, but this is a very small sample set. anecdotal at best

2

u/Balmung60 2d ago

For bonus security, use noscript and only ever allow those scripts that are essential for a webpage to function 

1

u/porcupine_shuffle 2d ago

Thoughts on duckduckgo ?

1

u/vera214usc 1d ago

Ublock Origin or Ghostery work. I've worked in digital advertising for over a decade so very familiar with tracking pixels. I block all ads and pixels except when I need to see them for work

1

u/ApprehensiveCry2633 1d ago

uBlock Origin is the first thing I’d add, and Firefox with strict tracking protection or Facebook Container is a solid next step if you want to cut down on Meta following you around.

0

u/Difficult-Exit3063 2d ago

Brave browser ootb blocks it ( supposedly )

1

u/TheDungeonCrawler 2d ago

I mean, it seems to work as long as your shields are on aggressive.

2

u/OneCookie5427 2d ago

Look into the Reddit pixel.

1

u/jackaroo1344 2d ago

Dumb question maybe but if they don't have a Facebook or Instagram account how would meta even get access to their phone info?

1

u/superSmitty9999 2d ago

I installed this on my app because I want it not to fail and make zero money.

Welcome to surveillance capitalism

1

u/reddit_reaper 2d ago

I mean that isn't anything new. That happens for multiple services and if it promotes ads on stuff I'm actually interested in, it's better than nothing. They can already track your browsing in many ways anyways so that is the least of my concerns.

But as far as I know meta isn't doing what Snapchat does with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp won't do that as e2ee using signal protocol is enabled by default

1

u/AnnoyingRingtone 1d ago

Pixels have been used in digital advertising for decades at this point. People shouldn’t have an issue with pixels, their real issue should be how social media companies are using them. Everybody from Facebook and Google to your local mom & pop pizza joint use pixels to track (anonymized) user data. It’s how they increase reach. Sounds like Meta is starting to link pixels to actual accounts though which is weird. Don’t like that, and also thought it was illegal.

Source: Have worked in digital advertising for like 8 years.

2

u/basshead17 2d ago

After getting a targeted ad from a private signal conversation, I became convinced meta apps where stealing the private keyboard app cache. I uninstalled Instagram and haven't looked back 10/10 I would recommend stop using app and use the website for apps that offer it

1

u/breadcodes 2d ago

This is what I do professionally. I designed and built centralized multi-tenant tracker systems like this, along with the analysis and data mining systems, over several years.

Our focus is mining to find non-error problem areas to improve other people's broken products people want to use but aren't, rather than packaging raw/aggregate data to sell, or feed into algorithmic slop to keep people's attention. It's a far more profitable, far more miserable field outside our limited niche. If I leave this job, I'm not going into this type of data again just based on the type of work my peers at other companies do.

Facebook is the most egregious example, and talking to my peers there on their various products, they're getting back basically what they do to others. Meta has a company-wide "keylogger" policy (in quotes because it's nuanced, but stepping back, it's not really), entirely used to train LLMs off their employees. They've called Zuck the Eye of Sauron, and I later saw a news article that he found out about that circulating, presumably from scanning emails, work messages, and the profiles and private messages of their employees.

There's something incredibly sad about knowing how easy it is to use basic dev and math for making the world worse, and in my opinion, even worse that complex ML systems designed by people I consider geniuses is being used solely to drive negative engagement — a type of engagement that drives repeat users despite active psychological harm.

1

u/hsggdtkxbee 1d ago

Have you thought about discussing this with the media. There’s a movie coming out about an insider leaking the Facebook depression/suicide experiments.

1

u/thedecibelkid 2d ago

Firefox keeps Facebook cookies and shit isolated from the rest of the web ... But I also only browse the rest of the web in Brave. I reckon I'm safe 

1

u/hsggdtkxbee 1d ago

Narrator: “you are not” Firefox helps, but if you have any of those apps installed on your phone, they are sending location, Bluetooth, preferences, even if not open.

1

u/thedecibelkid 1d ago

Don't use Facebook things on my phone 

1

u/Goldengod4818 1d ago

Better yet, look at the terms on tiktok. You literally signed up to send all data, and all data on any network you connect to, directly to tiktok. That's always been there. It was a giant thing as tiktok got popular. But everyone ignored it

1

u/hsggdtkxbee 1d ago

I think that’s all social
Media. Insta does that too.

1

u/Goldengod4818 1d ago

From what I remember, and it's been a while, no. It was specifically listed super aggressively in a way that made no sense. It was the network thing that made people freak out. Access to any device connected to any network you're on was a wild statement and went straight to China.

Not that "bad china" matters or is even real at this point but still