Facebook's Atlas: the Platform For Advertisers To Track Your Movements

An anonymous reader writes In its most direct challenge to Google yet, Facebook plans to sell ads targeted to its 1.3 billion users when they are elsewhere on the Web. The company is rolling out an updated version of Atlas that will direct ads to people on websites and mobile apps. From the article: "The company said Atlas has been rebuilt 'from the ground up' to cater for today's marketing needs, such as 'reaching people across devices and bridging the gap between online impressions and offline purchases.'"

Comments

NEWS?

[Ol Olsoc]

Facebook tracks everyone, not just their users.

Install noscripit, turn off all scripts. Go to a popular website. It probably won't work. Start allowing scripts. Eventually, the website should appear in all it's glorious tracky glory.

Now look at how many trackers you've enabled. Now look at how many are from facebook.

Re:NEWS?

[gstoddart]

In my experience very few of those trackers are actually required for the site to function.

If you're using something you can selectively disallow, you can usually get it to work no problem. If I can't, I leave.

So far, my best combination in Chrome is DoNotTrackMe, Scriptsafe, Ghostery, AdBlockPlus, HTTP SwitchBoard, and Disconnect.

HTTP Switchboard gives really good granularity and also does script and cookie blocking, plus several other things.

So far I've confirmed Safari has had the blocking of 3rd party cookies implemented incompetently, worked around, and never updated ... so that's the least trustworthy browser I've found.

Firefox has some good add-ons, can selectively block cookies NoScript, DoNotTrackMe, AdBlockPlus, Ghostery and Disconnect ... but I've not found anything with the granularity of HTTP Switchboard, so I suspect web-bugs can still slip by some of them.

I really wish Mozilla hadn't caved and decided not to implement strong blocking of crap ... unfortunately their desire for ad revenue trumped making a browser which could actually be made more private.

IE, well ... treat IE like the thing you use for work when all else fails. Because there's always another exploit around the corner.

Re:NEWS?

[unity]

"IE, well ... treat IE like the thing you use for work when all else fails. Because there's always another exploit around the corner."
Meh, I don't recall ever having much of a problem with IE. On the topic, there is a whole "tracking protection" section under IE accelerators. I block most all of it with these 4 easy to add addons:

http://easylist-msie.adblockpl...
http://easylist-msie.adblockpl...
http://www.privacychoice.org/t...
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdr...

And this ...

[gstoddart]

This is why all of the browsers I don't use for Facebook do not accept cookies from Facebook, do not allow them to set cookies, and in a few cases do not even allow traffic to them.

The amount of embedded crap in every page you visit is mind-boggling.

Every company wants to link to Facebook and as a result, Facebook pretty much knows everywhere you go.

The only way I trust Facebook is in a heavily locked down browser, which isn't used for anything else.

And, even then, I wouldn't trust Facebook as far as I could throw Zuckerfuck off a cliff ... and then won't let me measure that distance so far.

If your browser doesn't have at least 3 privacy extensions, you're handing all of this information over to these clowns to collect your data and do targeted marketing.

Just deny them the information and the ability to meaningfully know anything about you.

I block every advertising and analytics company I can find ... and it's bad enough that Slashdot on this page as I type has scorecard research, google analytics, google ad services, and whatever the heck RPX now is. Fortunately, they're all blocked.

I miss the internet before all of the assholes who want to advertise, monetize, track, correlate, and cross reference. But I'm sure as hell not going to let them get any information I can block from them.

hmmm

[jsepeta]

I'm feeling pretty good about having quit Facebook. It's more difficult for them to track me if I'm not a participant.

Re:hmmm

[gstoddart]

Think so? Because I don't.

Almost every commercial web page has embedded links to Facebook. Which means they're probably still tracking you anyway, they just can't correlate it to a specific Facebook users.

Unless you have a lot of privacy extensions, you might be surprised just how much tracking happens on every site you visit via web-bugs, cross-site crap, and several other things.

Simply not being logged into Facebook isn't really stopping them from getting at least some data unless you've taken other steps.

Re:hmmm

[ArcadeMan]

If you once had a Facebook account, you still have it. And it will be there until the end of times* + forever.

* I'm counting parallel universes and big crunch/big bang loops.

Re: adblock plus

[BarbaraHudson]

The default for AdBlock Plus is to allow some of the well-behaved ads through, so that users who like to support their favourite sites can do so in an unobtrusive way. It's easy to change - there's a checkbox on the dialog when you click on Filter Preferences to allow / disallow this. It's a reasonable compromise, and if everyone used this to only allow ads that don't behave badly, advertisers and their ad distribution networks would have to make their ads behave better.

Blocking all ads, on the other hand, gives them no incentive to change.

Firewall their IP addresses

[knorthern knight]

Depending which part of the planet you're in, most of your FB tracking attempts will come from one of the blocks below. Firewall them all to be safe.

31.13.24.0 - 31.13.31.255
31.13.24.0/21
IE-FACEBOOK-20110418
Facebook Ireland Ltd
IE

31.13.64.0 - 31.13.127.255
31.13.64.0/18
IE-FACEBOOK-20110418
Facebook Ireland Ltd
IE

66.220.144.0 - 66.220.159.255
66.220.144.0/20
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3

69.63.176.0 - 69.63.191.255
69.63.176.0/20
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3

69.171.224.0 - 69.171.255.255
69.171.224.0/19
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3

74.119.76.0 - 74.119.79.255
74.119.76.0/22
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3

103.4.96.0 - 103.4.99.255
103.4.96.0/22
FACEBOOK-SG

173.252.64.0 - 173.252.127.255
173.252.64.0/18
AS32934
FACEBOOK-INC

204.15.20.0 - 204.15.23.255
204.15.20.0/22
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3

Re: adblock plus

[JohnFen]

Advertising would be OK if it weren't so intrusive (tracking counts as intrusive) and/or obnoxious. That people loathe online advertising is because advertisers have behaved so incredibly badly. They've dug their own grave here.

I am also old enough to remember when the internet had very little advertising. Almost all services were just free outright (mostly run on a hobbyist basis or as a sideline to an established business or educational institution) or you paid money. There was no dearth of content in those days. In fact, by many measures, the content was far superior to what we have now.

Advertising is 100% optional. Sites use it because it's convenient, not because it's necessary.