Facebook does fling COOKIES around, but privacy is assured Facebook has responded to Belgian researchers' claims that the company violates European data law in an exhaustingly pedantic press release. Last week, a team of Belgian researchers reported that the social network giant had been illegally tracking the web browsing habits of every visitor, even if they aren't account holders, …
Yep, you have to loop it back. If you do the same with Google, pages load much much faster, or they don't load at all. Sites like these are the web equivalent of bloatware and spyware. if user binaries did this shit, you'd have more horrific stories similar to Java/Adobe. Well, Lenovo was just caught doing our, and you see how that went. Why should web bits be treated any different.
I missed the part were running a website entitled you to a license to steal privacy, but apparently it's literally a real license.
"I missed the part were running a website entitled you to a license to steal privacy, but apparently it's literally a real license."
Quite. It's a pity we can't invite all those involved in violating user privacy to a meeting for a reasoned discussion.
Blocking FB causes your browsers to wait for a timeout. If you are truly serious about this then why not:
* Redirect FB to Google+ - you'll triple their hits
* Use a transparent proxy to insert content of your choice (*)
* Redirect FB to 127.0.0.1 with predictably hillarious hosts file like results
* Redirect FB to a site that offends your totalitarian leadership a la China
* Use Squid (other proxies are available) to redirect FB to your webserver, which replies with very little. This is the correct answer by the way: a request should return something. If you want to mess with someone's website content, then you have to put some work in to change it or put up with timeouts.
Cheers
Jon
(*) OK - I've done this with a filter in Squid years ago, Google "upsidedownternet". I just have again and the original post is lost amongst all the howtos. Wish I could find the original again - anyone?
"transparent about [its] use of cookies, and has long disclosed their use to improve [users'] experience on Facebook"
How on earth is this a defence against accusations of tracking non users, except in La-La land? If I don't ever access your site, I shouldn't have your garbage on my machine - ever. I couldn't care less whose experience it improves.
If they persist with this, or expect non-users to take some action to prevent it, they're definitely prime candidate to end up as the EU's once-a-decade bogeyman that actually gets action taken against them that hurts.
All these articles about the Great Cannon have a bit of a negative tinge to them. I for one welcome the Great Cannon and would like to propose a crowdfund drive to steer the cannon toward Facebook.com - I bet for a few hundred thousand we could even get them to kick it up to 5% power.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
