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A Facebook Employee Asked a Reporter To Turn Off His Phone So Facebook Couldn't Track Its Location (businessinsider.com)
Steve Kovach, writing for BusinessInsider: To corporate giants like Facebook, leaks to rivals or the media are a cardinal sin. That notion was clear in a new Wired story about Facebook's rocky time over the last two years. The story talks about how Facebook was able to find two leakers who told a Gizmodo reporter about its news operations. But one source for the Wired story highlighted just how concerned employees are about how their company goes after leakers. According to the story, the source, a current Facebook employee, asked a Wired reporter to turn off his phone so Facebook wouldn't be able to use location tracking and see that the two were close to each other for the meeting. The Wired's 11,000-word wide-ranging piece, for which it spoke with more than 50 current and former Facebook employees, gives us an inside look at how the company has been struggling to curb spread of fake news; battling internal discrimination among employees; and becoming furious when anything leaks to the media. Another excerpt from the story: The day after Fearnow (a contractor who leaked information to a Gizmodo reporter) took that second screenshot was a Friday. When he woke up after sleeping in, he noticed that he had about 30 meeting notifications from Facebook on his phone. When he replied to say it was his day off, he recalls, he was nonetheless asked to be available in 10 minutes. Soon he was on a video-conference with three Facebook employees, including Sonya Ahuja, the company's head of investigations. According to his recounting of the meeting, she asked him if he had been in touch with Nunez (the Gizmodo reporter, who eventually published this and this). He denied that he had been. Then she told him that she had their messages on Gchat, which Fearnow had assumed weren't accessible to Facebook. He was fired. "Please shut your laptop and don't reopen it," she instructed him.
They don't need you to have an account with them in order to track you. They create a shadow profile for you and log your movement across the web using their various web properties and associated sites.
That will help. I would recommend Ghostery as well. This very website has at least 8 active trackers.
There's generally no way to prevent any app from accessing your location on Android
Of course there is. Install LineageOS, which comes with privacy guard. Or, if you want to keep your current ROM, install the XPosed framework. XPosed with XPrivacy is especially great because you can feed apps fake location data. Back when i still had Facebook they thought I was in the middle of the pacific ocean one day, and in the Arctic the next.
A few years ago Ghostery got bought out and changed their policies to "block all but our partner trackers"...they're useless now.
While doing Android development i find it disturbing to say the least that while debugging my extremely basic app (think hello world) I see calls to Facebook and Amazon urls in my console logs.
WTH is up with that, I'm just a novice?
Caution: Contents under pressure
Ghostery isn't trustworthy. But uMatrix would be a good addition.
yes the cricle - a lady embraces the new absolute surveillance as it allows her to connect with fellow humans and the bad white man who did not appreciate the full transparency all that much dies one can say in hushed into death as an hunted animal running from the dogs. I exaggerate of course but then my neighbours told me many times they see nothing wrong in absolute transparency. Majority accepts the new brave world. What else can they do? The 'good doers' like Zuckerberg, Soros & Co do what they can to improve the world. The only problem I have with it is that I cannot escape from this paradise.
Using plugins is a good idea, but I find killing the traffic further upstream is more effective.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Buahahahahaha, this is the US we are talking about. There are no privacy protections. If a company employs you, they basically own you. They can look at absolutely anything they want if you're on a corporate-owned device. You are basically locked into a company because if you leave somewhere you no longer have health insurance and your company may blacklist you so you can't find a job elsewhere. Only laws that benefit corporations are ever passed as the governmental officials are owned by the corporations. Companies can do anything they want, down to regulating what activities you do when not at work or dictating when you piss. They can fire you at any time for almost any reason. The only exception is for certain protected classes (rage, gender, religion, etc.) but if they are firing someone for being black they just say "they aren't a team player" or "didn't align with our corporate culture" - it doesn't really matter as long as you don't mention their protected class and cite something sufficiently nebulous. The only real protected class is the US is profit.
Enigma
Facebook recently went so far over the line I'd hope a civil suit might even have a chance... the mobile app is taking recent photos, uploading them Facebooks servers, and asking if you want to share them, without having any ability to turn off the "feature" short of revoking access to photos through the app manager entirely (so you can't even upload the photos you do want to share). Whenever this is brought up in the support forum, the thread is locked.