Commonwealth Games are just the ticket for Facebook Facebook may be up to its armpits in alligators, but that hasn't stopped Australia's Gold Coast Council from chumming up with the ad-farm to offer free Wi-Fi to visitors at the upcoming Commonwealth Games. The council, which has laid AU$5 million worth of its own broadband fibre backbone, is following a model familiar to cafe …
I can't believe the government would sell out like that. Using the Facebook login allows them to drop cookies, beacons and every other bit of tracking technology on you so they can follow you to majority of websites you visit.
If you value your privacy, just tolerate the low speed service.
not dealt with Oz state gummints much, have you {S}
The PHB class here love making simple services harder, like paying bills on line. Too easy to use bog standard credit card. Like most of the data slurpers, they have swallowed the techno-utopian vision of every online activity having its own account so we all have multiple accounts and passwords to remember, even if used once or twice a year. Its as if they are in thrall to simple unclued spooks, rapacious snooping firms and politicians. Oh wait...
The place never stopped being a penal colony. Check out the security theatre for the games including airport style full body scanners (rapiscan have the contract are these the xray scanners or the terahertz ones) wonder what happens to the images. There will be back scatter xray vans on the gold coast - who cares about public health. And the never ending increase in police powers to keep us safe. Gold Coast, a good place to keep away from for the period of the games and possibly beyond.
"Check out the security theatre for the games including airport style full body scanners"
The scanners have probably been re-tuned to see the most important games contraban articles of all time: Fecking bottles of water.
Because the worst thing in the world you could do is deprive the sales outlets (inside the games walls) from their well deserved marked up profits.
The Hosts file is your friend. Just point the untrusted data gatherer URLs to 127.0.0.1
Or use NoScript in Firefox. I just have the ElReg URLs white listed, the tracking garbage can't run code - I don't mind them showing me static ads, they have to pay their way, but you don't need JavaScript to show me an ad.
All using the same login.
Step 1 ) create "commonwealthgamesfreewifi" as an account name.
Step 2 ) promote it on the webs with #notrackatthecommonwealthgames
Step 3) facebook get very little data, except what they take from other apps.
You can log in from multiple devices but i expect they will notice when hundreds do.... but seriously, creating blank throw away facebook accounts will soon become like spamhole email accounts.
"but seriously, creating blank throw away facebook accounts will soon become like spamhole email accounts."
I suspect that as well as amalgamating all the data made available whilst the throwaway account is in use on the wifi, data analytics techniques are able to attribute throwaway accounts to an individual with reasonable certainty.
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