Mad at Meta? Don't Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data
103 comments
·February 7, 2025Jean-Papoulos
larsnystrom
I agree it's ironic, however they seem to use an inert version of the share button. The default share button by Facebook contacts Facebook when you view the page, doesn't matter whether you click the button or not. The one used by EFF only contacts Facebook when you click it.
exmadscientist
What happens if you've never been a Meta user? I have never had any kind of business relationship with Meta (so far as I know), and have never agreed to any contract or terms of service. What can I do, under US law, to minimize what they store about me and my behavior, or at least keep tabs on them?
dylan604
Is this rhetorical? Nothing. Every website that adds their code will be tracking you. Every friend, acquaintance, or anyone that you’ve shared your contact with for what ever reason that has given them access to their contacts has provided your info for you. There’s nothing you can do about it.
At the rate we’re going, it will soon be law that you have to allow them to track you. The Zuck just hasn’t figured out yet that if he writes larger checks, he can get an executive order that would benefit him.
ericjmorey
How does Meta track me when blocking the JavaScript from Meta controlled urls?
belter
- Server-Side Tracking with CNAME Cloaking & Direct Server Calls
- Image-Based Tracking withPixel in No-JS Mode
- URL Parameter Tracking
- First-Party Cookies from Partner Sites
- IP & Fingerprinting
- Social Graph Inference
- Embedded iFrames & Cross-Site Requests
F#^$^%$$ Suckerberg...
aqueueaqueue
Your face on a geotagged photo.
SapporoChris
"Is this rhetorical? Nothing" Nonsense, and the article addresses this. "Block Meta’s Trackers"
dylan604
Great, what about people that cannot install blockers?
What about sites that sell the data they collect to Meta? If you think Meta's trackers are the only way Meta collects data, then you just need to learn more about data collection.
ffsm8
It's not nonsense. Meta will have a shadow profile of pretty much everyone, wherever the person in question is blocking their trackers or not.
It's still a good idea to block them, because it will reduce the amount of information they'll have about you, making their shadow profile less useful
Nonetheless, Meta knows you exist and will almost certainly be able to tell some things about you
yoaviram
If you live in one of the states that has strong privacy regulations send Meta a data deletion request. Or if you are curious about the data they have on you, send them an access request to get a copy of your data, and then a deletion request.
In some cases Meta ignores these requests. If that happens to you then complain to the state regulator. Both sending requests and complaining is easy as sending an email / filling in a form.
mr_mitm
I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger which should mitigate tracking via the "share with Facebook" button. I also use Cookie Autodelete (except for whitelisted domains) which should make tracking via cookies next to impossible. Users can be fingerprinted via other means, and I know my fingerprint is unique, so I try to make my fingerprint different every time. For this I use a UserAgent randomizer (which unfortunately breaks some sites (e.g. youtube), which then have to be whitelisted).
I think this should minimize the impact of their tracking, but surely the Hacker News crowd will now give me suggestions for improvement.
esperent
It's almost certain that you've agreed to privacy terms somewhere (even if just a misclicked cookie box) that has the lines:
"You consent to processing... by us and our partners..."
Where the partners list includes 400 or so companies, one of which is for sure Meta.
Would this hold up on court? No idea. But I'm sure Meta will happily take you consent and run with it, as will all the other companies.
seabass-labrax
The option to accept or decline cookies is, unfortunately for parent, not necessarily legally enforceable outside the European Union and the United Kingdom. There might be an argument that Meta cannot track a user after explicitly offering the ability to opt-out (promissory estoppel?), but I rather doubt it.
In the EU/UK, the argument is academic, as the GDPR requires ongoing consent to track a user: you can't sign away your privacy in perpetuity.
caseyy
They'll keep a shadow profile on you anyways. If you want Meta to not know you exist, it's probably almost impossible.
hulitu
> What can I do, under US law, to minimize what they store about me and my behavior, or at least keep tabs on them?
Nothing. They just make shadow profiles. You can sue them (see Google), but they get a pat on the back.
noja
Shadow profiles
amatecha
IMO, skip all the "FB settings" shenanigans and instead just block all Meta (and Google while you're at it) properties using a Pi-Hole on your whole network. VPN into your own LAN with Tailscale and use the Pi-Hole for DNS resolution and never see that shit on your phone again, either. If you want to go a step further, you could do this blocking at the router/firewall level, if you have hardware capable of this.
xyst
Tailscale is a bit overpowered for just using custom DNS. Even if it’s “free” for personal use.
A simple WireGuard server setup at home configured with my custom DNS resolver to block known tracking urls and setting up VPN profiles on devices works for me.
amatecha
Yeah the problem (for me anyway) with doing a normal VPN is having to open ports on your router. Though, not the end of the world, but with Tailscale your firewall can continue to block all incoming from the outside world.
bjelkeman-again
So how do I make my mom do this? /s Seriously, even I would have to spend a day or two to figure this out. We need something simple for 99.99% of people to use.
ericjmorey
Setting up a piehole at your mom's house would require your mom to do nothing. But it will break a lot of things that she'll prot complain about.
ranguna
Once you have things running, all you have to do is connect your mom's phone to your vpn.
amatecha
Yeah, my point is that toggling some settings in Facebook won't do much of anything if you don't want to be tracked by these scumbags. I mean, regardless, your mom doesn't have to do anything if you swap her crappy ISP-provided router with a new router running opnsense or pfsense (and a bit of configuration to block the Meta-related domains). Entire households can become Meta-free with a single hardware swap. It doesn't require that much tech knowledge to do it - the one tech-savvy person in an extended family of dozens can do this stuff.
bjelkeman-again
I get it. A lot of people on HN seem to think every family has a tech nerd in it to do this. I’d rather we had spa consume solution for it. But I suspect we’ll never get there.
TheEnder8
The thing is, its not just Meta. It's anyone with a square inch of pixels that you can slap an ad on. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Meta gets a lot of flack, but it's easy to stop using Facebook. It's a lot harder to stop using Google or Amazon.
pickledoyster
> it's easy to stop using Facebook. It's a lot harder to stop using Google or Amazon.
Not in my country, where Facebook owns basically the entire messaging space through Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. I have been able to switch my default search engine, email provider, mobile OS, office suite, etc. from Google no problem, but the network effect has been too strong to get most of my friends out of Meta's ad network. It doesn't help that most groups and basically all events are organized through there.
The only real messaging alternative with significant adoption at this point seems to be Telegram, which I cannot support for numerous reasons, primarily for the founder selling the entire user base of vkontakte to an authoritarian state.
amanaplanacanal
One thing I have noticed is that local businesses don't have websites any more, they have Facebook pages instead. So if you want to find out about local events, Facebook is the only way.
the_gipsy
Not solution to the network problem, but you can bridge/puppet Whatsapp, Instagram, telegram, to matrix.org.
oefnak
How can you bridge WhatsApp to matrix? Can you still send pictures?
yard2010
Over the course of 5-6 years, I managed to move everyone that is important enough to me to Telegram. I don't care about privacy at all, I just couldn't stand the wrong abrasive spit-in-your-face whatsapp UX. It's funny how facebook was enshitified long before it was cool.
Now I don't have notifications enabled for Whatsapp and I rarely answer messages there. It makes me a freak by many standards but I'm free from enshitification in this regard!
lokimokitako
Can you use signal?
sometimes_all
They could, but its unlikely other people in their network will.
pickledoyster
some of us do but the adoption is too low for any meaningful network effect
mikae1
As a Swede, the Amazon comment is funny.
They came here perhaps two years ago and everybody I know agrees they suck and can not compete with our local alternatives. They're not cheaper and the website is an utter mess of auto translations and dark patterns. Order flash storage and pray it's not counterfeit. We use Prisjakt[1] to compare prices and price history between shops.
About Google... Yes, YouTube is hard for me to avoid. I use StartPage for search (which is Google search proxy just like DDG is a Bing proxy). Switching to DDG wouldn't be that much of a sacrifice. I don't have a Google account and YT works well via RSS. FreshRSS is basically my YT frontend.
Facebook is the hardest to leave, without a doubt. Civil society isn't organized around any of Amazon's or Google's services. Parent group for school? Facebook. A group for your neighborhood? Facebook. Local trading of goods? Facebook marketplace. I've made the data takeout and have been hovering over that account deletion button I don't know how many times... But I don't follow through.
So, I respectfully don't agree. :)
ericjmorey
It took 20+ years for Amazon to supplant the retail infrastructure in the US. They may just be getting started in Sweden.
mikae1
Highly (and sadly) likely. They're obviously not in a hurry.
Yizahi
I'm reasonably sure that if you will block every single Amazon owned address at your entry firewall, a majority of the apps or sites will stop working for you. That's what is implied by saying that it is not possible to avoid Google, Amazon and either one of the MS or Apple.
averageRoyalty
I've never seen anything indicating that AWS does any level of user level tracking of people who access the instrastructure it sells on, have you?
I understand AWS is part of Amazon, but I think in the context of this discussion they're quite fairlt being treated as isolated companies.
mattmaroon
It’s pretty easy to stop using Amazon.
barrell
It’s also pretty easy to stop using Google - Kagi and proton will get you 70% of the way there
mc3301
Google is more than just a search engine for many people... Shared calendars, documents, maps, mail, mobile OS, browser, etc.
mc3301
The online shop or AWS?
Yizahi
More like impossible
Yizahi
If anyone is interested, there was an experiment about that. A week without either of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook. And last week without all 5. Very illuminating.
https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-l...
jimmydoe
for non tech ppl it’s too complicated to turn off ad settings. Just work with those close to you to export data and delete account. And you don’t have to do it all at once. You can delete X for them today and instagram next months. It’s a rehab process for addicts, they need your continuous love and care, or they might go back to those drugs.
Gormo
The only way that the ever-growing risks inherent in being dependent on centralized platforms will ever be addressed is for "non tech people" to start learning about tech.
There is no way to reconcile "I want to trust other people to do things I don't understand but are critically important to me" with "I don't want to allow third parties to have control over things that are critically important to me.
You can neither do it yourself nor hold your fiduciaries accountable without having at least a foundational understanding of how things actually work.
jimmydoe
. The society is holding together by some level of trust others. Over emphasize individual self dependence is not helpful IMO. But instead of trust the big platform, we can go back trust people near you in the real world. As the more technical person in a small community, we all holds responsibility to help out.
Gormo
> The society is holding together by some level of trust others. Over emphasize individual self dependence is not helpful IMO.
The maintenance of social trust is entirely conditional on the ease with which people can revoke it or transfer it to others. The ability to exercise the right of exit is the primary thing that mitigates fiduciary risk and allows trust between individuals to be established. Society is a network of relations among individuals, and it only exists as a consequence of people exercising individual autonomy.
People having the means to do things for themselves in a pinch is precisely what enables them to trust others without fear of being abused.
k310
Having been involved with personal computing from its inception, I believe that companies made computers difficult to use for whatever reasons, be they catering to “power users”, business or just plain inattention to the non-techie user.
Apple was better in this respect, but in recent times, has vast mysteries. I have written up how to save tabs in ios Safari and (this is real good) how to convert a webp file to jpg or png on ios. It’s frickin baroque. (Vastly easier on a mac) But I digress.
Centralized web apps allowed people in essence to create web pages (without SeaMonkey). Apple had the key to hypertext with HyperCard and dropped it. And by the way, average people were writing their own apps in HyperCard. I was writing complex scientific graphing apps for work in HyperCard, and outputting EPS files for tech pubs.
I saw a simplified computer “for old folks” and can relate that when my non-tech brother got tired of reinstalling his drivers with every Windows update, switched to a Dell Linux system, packaged and supported and after some initial questions about apps to use, hasn’t asked me anything in years. It’s not that Linux is streamlined or simple. It’s just that when you install the 4 apps you use all the time, life is good.
I can’t say what should have taken place, because that’s in the “woulda coulda shoulda” basket and it’s best just to move forward.
Gormo
> I believe that companies made computers difficult to use for whatever reasons, be they catering to “power users”, business or just plain inattention to the non-techie user.
I don't think that's quite accurate. "Power users" are simply the users who bothered to learn how computers work. Dumbing technology down to the level of people who couldn't be be so bothered is precisely what's lead to all of the centralization and abuse. It's also diminished the value of the technology itself, since simplifying user interfaces to a level that fails to express the inherent complexity of the system makes its full functionality inaccessible.
Trying to make things "easy" leads to making them less powerful, less adaptable to the needs of the user, and less accessible and responsive to users who do care to learn how they work. At the end of the day, there's simply no way to attain the full value of technology without significant risk exposure if you don't put at least a little time and effort into understanding it.
TimByte
As long as the business model is built on monetizing personal data, they'll always find workarounds
redleader55
I find it hilarious that the article starts with "are you mad at Meta for trying to appease the guy at the head of federal government" and ends with "we need strong federal privacy laws". It's the same federal government, you either trust it to legislate or you don't.
AxiomaticSpace
The federal government is not a unitary organization. It's logically consistent to both not like the president and want congress to pass privacy laws.
GuardianCaveman
The right federal privacy laws would protect people regardless of the flavor of the 4 years if they're actually enshrined in law and would take something other than an executive order to undo.
amanaplanacanal
That's the way it's supposed to work, yes. But it requires you to get the courts to agree and the executive to enforce. Which isn't a given anymore.
smcin
It's not just about the US or the current or previous US govt: there are billions more tech users in EU, Canada, Asia, Central & South America, Africa. They also have differing levels of electronic privacy. EFF has members in those countries too.
The next major accountability moment for measuring the use of tech will be the 2/2025 German federal election, Canadian and Australian elections, also Chile, Norway, SG. When combined with 2024 (US, UK, France, India, SK, [0]) should at least give a pretty rich readout on the state of digital media and privacy, also YT/FB/IG/TT/Twitter/Bluesky/Rednote
[0]: Pew Research: "Global Elections in 2024: What We Learned in a Year of Political Disruption" https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/12/11/global-electio...
yard2010
The current administration is an.. unprecedented one to say the least. Maybe I'm old.
null
cyberax
I trust the Federal government, if it follows all the procedures with all the safeguards in place.
computerthings
Trump is neither the government, nor is he "the laws", nor allowed to make laws.
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/three-branches/what-...
amanaplanacanal
That's the way it's supposed to work. But it requires both the courts to say so, and the executive to follow along.
computerthings
Even when the executive doesn't follow along, the President never is "the government", and never "the law", in the context of what the comment to I replied called "hilarious". When I say there should be human rights, and that some tyrant sucks, that's not hilarious just because that tyrant has goons ignoring the law.
50208
An addict can't use occasionally or use less ... there is only 1 way to quit. You have to actually quit.
ulfw
Mad at Meta yet trust their settings? That's gotta be a small crossover in the Venn diagram.
em3rgent0rdr
That was just EFF's first recommendation. Their next recommendation "Install Privacy Badger to Block Meta’s Trackers" is much more effective.
ipv6ipv4
Mad at Meta? Don’t work there, and don’t let your friends work there. It’s unethical.
xnx
Great message. I wish the instructions were even more succinct and direct.
tokioyoyo
Eh, I personally gave up and accepted that I lost the war. It’s kinda nice to be a normie who doesn’t care about much about it. Basic ad blocking, and just generally not caring about what happens with my data. Does it sound awful? Absolutely! But it feels weirdly free, compared to my 2020-self.
To be very fair though, I just use WhatsApp because that’s the messenger of choice for basically everyone in the world. And Facebook marketplace/groups.
There's a facebook share button right next to the article. The jokes write themselves : https://imgur.com/a/TbIjZSV