Facebook Meta - like many other tech titans - has institutional Shiny Object Syndrome. It goes something like this: Launch a product to great fanfare Spend a few years hyping it as ✨the future✨ Stop answering emails and pull requests If you're lucky, announce that the product is abandoned but, more likely, just forget about it. Open Graph Protocol (OGP) is one of those products. The value-proposition is simple. It's hard for computers to pick out the main headline, image, and other data …
Continue reading →
Facebook has an interesting feature. It will let you see which companies have associated your off-Facebook activity with your Facebook account. If you visit: https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/ you'll see what companies are snitching on you to Facebook. Alice St⭕️llmeyer@StollmeyerEU#AirBnB shares your activity with #Facebook ?!Delete that @Airbnb app, folks! Mine didn't even allow me to change its Facebook connection 😡 isn't that against GDPR, @vestager & @dreynders?And delete yo…
Continue reading →
(Another in a long list of posts which will turn out to be touchingly naïve!) When teaching people about safe sex, one topic bitterly divides people - whether abstinence is a suitable method. Simply refusing to engage in sexual activity will protect you from pregnancy, disease, and trauma. Abstinence is particularly promoted by religious zealots. Similarly, whenever social media is discussed, privacy zealots proclaim that the only safe option is to jUSt dELeTE FaCEBooK! The problem with …
Continue reading →
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply-reasoned examination of the threat of unprecedented power free from democratic oversight. As it explores this new capitalism's impact on society, politics, business, and technology, it exposes the struggles that will decide both the next chapter of capitalism and the meaning of information civilization. It shows how we can protect ourselves and our communities and ensure we are the masters of the digital rather than its slaves. Possibly the…
Continue reading →
One of the most important tools in the war for your attention is the ability to critically examine media and discover its provenance. Take this example - a friend of a friend was tagged in this Facebook post, and so it appeared on my feed: WOW! Right! Nature is Coooooool! Or is it? If "The Planet Today" were a reputable source of news, they would tell us who the photographer was. Or where the shot was taken. Or... well... anything about the photo. But they're just a clickbait farm, so …
Continue reading →
It was back in the late 1990s when I first got started with ad blocking. I don't remember if it was the "punch the monkey" adverts, or the pop-unders for weird security systems that tipped me over the edge. All I knew was my computer was slowing down and I thought animated ads were the culprit. I found a USENET post which explained how to modify my totally-legitimate copy of Windows 98 to block ads. In those days, it was easy. Open C:\Windows\hosts with a normal text editor, add the site you…
Continue reading →
(…all analogies break down eventually…) On receiving a new credit card, there are two kinds of people in this world: OMG! FREE MONEY! SPEND IT ALL!!!!! This is a tool which can be used appropriately to make my life better. The first set of people quickly hit the limit of the card and are often reduced to making minimum repayments. This can then trap them in a lifetime of debt. Seriously, borrow £3,000 on a credit card and minimum repayments will only clear it after 30 years. Often the only…
Continue reading →
Like many people, I can't be bothered using Facebook's mobile app. I live my life in the browser and don't need a battery-hungry, always listening, contact stealing app notifying me every five minutes. I check Facebook Messages when I want. If it's urgent, there are many better ways to contact me than Messenger. Until recently, all was well in the world. I happily used Facebook's mobile web site. Then this happened. That, frankly, is bullshit. Why do I need an app to display messages? …
Continue reading →
Like a lot of you, my Facebook feed often fills up with dodgy adverts for discount sunglasses. In this case, Mark's account has been hacked and the spammers are tagging lots of his friends. The post then shows up on my feed as "look what your friend is up to!" Annoying. So, here's how to stop it. There's a slightly obscure FB privacy setting called: Review posts that friends tag you in before they appear on your Timeline? Timeline Review controls whether you have to manually approve…
Continue reading →
Last week I was on the In The Abstract podcast. I came up with a curious idea. If I were Tom Scott, I'd turn this into a performance piece - instead, here's a short and entirely fictional story. Facebook knew you were in love a long time before you did. It noticed you scrolling back through her timeline. Every millisecond lingering over the photos of her at the beach was faithfully logged. When she sent a message to her best friend saying "Hot date tonight ;-)" it correlated all the…
Continue reading →
Facebook rewrite URLs with Unicode in the path - this is not best practice and could be dangerous. It is possible to create a URL like http://bit.ly/😀 - the Unicode characters are valid in the path. The URL Encoded representation is : bit.ly/%F0%9F%98%80 Facebook mangles these URLs in such a way that it might be possible to redirect a user to a malicious site. Here's what's happening. When Facebook sees the "😀" character in text, it rewrites it to the "" character (󾰀). That's a …
Continue reading →
I've nothing against the Swedes. Lovely people. Sweden is the third-largest country in the European Union by area. But I'm not from there. Neither, as far as I am aware, is Facebook. But Twitter seems to think so. When I share a link to Twitter on Facebook, this (sometimes) happens. And sometimes, I get this delightfully mangled Unicode atrocity! So, what's going on? When Facebook wants to display a link, its servers send a quick web request to the URL that the user has typed into the…
Continue reading →
