Facebook is for sharing

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LarsMac
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Facebook is for sharing

Post by LarsMac »

The clinic and other medical facilities near us do not allow employees and visiting medicos to have any link to Facebook and other social media on any computer system which contains or is connected to any medical and insurance information.



https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... t-consent

NHS trusts are sharing intimate details about patients’ medical conditions, appointments and treatments with Facebook without consent and despite promising never to do so.

An Observer investigation has uncovered a covert tracking tool in the websites of 20 NHS trusts which has for years collected browsing information and shared it with the tech giant in a major breach of privacy.

The data includes granular details of pages viewed, buttons clicked and keywords searched. It is matched to the user’s IP address – an identifier linked to an individual or household – and in many cases details of their Facebook account.
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spot
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Re: Facebook is for sharing

Post by spot »

LarsMac wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 4:34 pmThe data includes granular details of pages viewed, buttons clicked and keywords searched. It is matched to the user’s IP address – an identifier linked to an individual or household – and in many cases details of their Facebook account.
The Observer team knows where to stroke a story to get the public attention. The story is huge, it's the focus on the NHS and privacy leaks that makes it echo around the world. Written the way I'll rewrite it here people just yawn, but I think the actual story below is the interesting one.

Here we go. Strap in.

A whole stack of companies out there offer really attractive analytics for peanuts. At the top of the heap are the social media companies but they could be anyone. The reason social media companies are so keen to do it is that they already hold more information about any user than the user's granny ever did, and collectively the analytics companies have billions of active users.

What the analytic offer involves is approximately this: register your website with our analytic service, and copy these five or so lines into your standard header that exists on every web page you serve, and we'll give you startlingly detailed and accurate statistical reports on how your website is being used by your users. And we'll charge you so little money - usually none at all - that it will be laughably trivial at most.

So, the IT management of these big web server implementers like the NHS says this is immensely useful and practically free, of course we'll embed your 1x1 invisible pixel and JavaScript snippet or whatever it is in our header, and then their analytics pour in and their departments pore over the graphs and feel happy.

Back at Google or Facebook or Twitter, every URL with whatever interactive button-press and even potentially keystroke can be reported from every website that participates. That detail can be linked to a tracker-ID to collate an individual's behavior across many websites which all carry the analytic trigger. How much of that they dare store is up to the provider, because if they're caught holding the sort of stuff the Observer article mentions then they're going to be hung out to dry which is why they don't actually hold what's described. I think the Observer team would agree with that, but they printed what's sent out not what's permanently stored by the analytics provider because it's sexier.

Nobody is going to prevent IT management from sleeping with the whores of Babylon in exchange for a few URLs and clicks, they're not going to be jailed for it or even fired.

Nobody is going to exterminate social media companies. No government is going to prevent this from happening in exchange for free access to the social media user data hoard.

The way for an individual to retain a degree of privacy is very hampered. Just using a VPN isn't going to work because everyone's device is unique. What gets tracked across the internet by these tracking fragments is a unique ID constructed on the fly on the user's device whenever it gets sent in response to different hyperlink clicks, but it's still going to get accumulated for that one user and after a short while it will match you by name, address, phone number and shoe size. Your IP address may channel-hop all it wants, it's still your device and it's still on a list of devices you've used from one day to the next.

The thing on your device which runs the tracking fragment is your app. It might be an email app or a banking app or a browser app or Grand Theft Auto but if it uses the Internet and the supplier gets analytics then it's reporting your activity. Primarily it's your browser.

So, if you put a tracking blocker into your browser you're a lot cleaner, because the tracking blocker prevents all the tracking fragments from activating.

The entire industry, from the social media companies to the IT management of the NHS hospital trust, doesn't care. Maybe 2% of the world's users run a tracking blocker extension. a 98% database is good enough to make a profit from.

There are privacy-enhanced browsers like Brave which embed tracker blockers for all users by default. If everyone used a browser like Brave and a VPN the problem would disappear for a while. That's the "pigs might fly" aspect.

Finally, standing out like a sore thumb by blocking trackers makes you a very suspect Internet user. If you're not guilty then why are you hiding?

It's a great Observer article and I hope a few IT managers get steamrollered and I hope the Information Commissioners fine a few firms a few billion dollars, but the problem isn't going to go away.
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