As anyone who is, or has, worked in ad-tech would tell you, this is pretty _tame_ in terms of the "offline conversion problem."
When there are $billions$ of dollars at stake for this type of information, you can guarantee there will be many companies attacking this problem.
Therefore, not to be a pessimist, but if you think that 1) using a fake cell number on Facebook is going to help or that 2) there aren't services like Google doing this already, potentially with just as good match rates as Facebook, or 3) that using Firefox + adblock is all you need, then you're going to be constantly plugging holes in a leaking boat.
> you're going to be constantly plugging holes in a leaking boat.
True, but the ad industry isn't like a boat. They don't want to track everything or build a complete profile about everyone. They just want to track most things and build a fairly complete profile about most people.
That means every privacy step you make has some incremental gains. Just because a private detective could use the collected data to build a complete profile of you, doesn't mean the ad company will - they'll collect data from the easiest sources, and if you make it too hard for them to get data about you, they'll simply collect data about other people.
False flags and information is the only way to deal with this stuff...
If FB thinks you're a 72 yr old retired dentist from OK, and you buy nothing but feminine hygiene products and 3 wheel wheel barrels, you're pretty worthless as a consumer.
The future of ad block is disinformation. Makes the entire ecosystem worthless
You are so right. People forget that the cell companies know who you are and where you are 100% of the time. They also know every site you visit on their network. Things like this remind me of people using TOR and then signing into Instagram or Facebook. You just destroyed your anonymity. These sites would need to allow for anonymous login structures that almost none do.
Working in ad-tech I know these problems are ubiquitous but apart from trying to patch these issues when we notice them in whatever in significant ways we can what else can you do?
If you have location history enabled in Google Maps, they tie it to ad impressions and offline credit card transactions they buy from Visa and friends.
Just checked mine. Literally hundreds of entries. 700+
Crikey. Just downloaded all the data and having a browse. 22k line location file (about 3k locations) stored too. I don't have the app installed on any device i own. I presumed the mobile page wouldn't have permission. Checking the data it does seem to stop when I changed phone (samsung preinstall fb app)
$ date -d @1495296127
Sat 20 May 17:02:07 BST 2017
$ date -d @1573424412
Sun 10 Nov 22:20:12 GMT 2019
What are they doing with ancient location data?
Also have every deliveroo purchase I've made in there
they have an entry for every deliveroo purchase i've made
> Suppose I go to a restaurant, and I booked using my name and phone number. The restaurant sends that data to Facebook to say "Terence Eden ate at this restaurant on this day."
Do I read this correctly that a restaurant will just dump its complete visitor log to FB and then let FB "sort it out".
Meaning that FB gets to vacuum the info on everyone including those without FB accounts?
So one of the comments on the post got my pressure up before coffee had a chance to kick in:
"It's just offline conversion events being uploaded so you'd stop getting these ads, or so they can market to you again in the future. You purchased this product, gave them a phone number.. Not sure where the issue lies? You agreed to the terms on Spreadshirt which is probably where you opted for marketing."
This is the basic approach. You give it to us. You agree to whatever we put in legalese and now we can do whatever we want. What?
It is disheartening, but I agree with the rest of the posts on HN that it is not at all surprising.
Perhaps ironically, I'm frankly astounded at the apparent naïveté still held about Facebook, Google, et al.
> I have never used FaceBook [sic] login for anything
> Facebook doesn't even have my phone number, only my name and my business email address.
People, if any company has A-N-Y-thing that can be associated with you, online or offline, you have no privacy. None. It is gone forever.
There is billions of dollars at stake for companies to build as complete a picture as possible of you and every detail of your life. And billions more remains on the table. That is plenty motivation to fuel a highly-lucrative market for accurate, meaningful profiling for years.
Sure, there's a long list of actions you could take to begin minimizing your exposure, the practicality of each varying widely. But frankly, most of them would only serve to make going about daily life inconvenient. (And the correlation between effectiveness and convenience isn't 1:1...)
The best case scenario is your data becoming stale, such that its values diminishes to a degree that makes it effectively background noise.
There is simply no means of unembedding yourself. But also, more discouragingly, for most people there is no practical means to avoid being ingested.
> It goes to show, Facebook's level of transparency of data isn't good enough.
I'm actually quite (pleasantly) surprised that Facebook provides this information, and somewhat curious why the author is angry at them rather than "Lan Tim 2".
Home Depot lets you sign up to have your receipts emailed to you. Turns out if you do this they will send what you purchase to Facebook with your email, which was connected to my account.
I use Firefox to avoid being tracked by Facebook, and never login with Facebook. But it looks like I slipped up in signing up for email receipts!
Even if I didn't have a Facebook account, Facebook would still be building a profile on me using my email address /phone number in anticipation of the day I made an account.
This is seriously just a purchase event for a t-shirt that OP got. There is no mysterious Lan Tim 2 its just a random app for a random merchant that uses FB Ads and uses offline conversion / uploads.
> Suppose I go to a restaurant, and I booked using my name and phone number. The restaurant sends that data to Facebook to say "Terence Eden ate at this restaurant on this day." Facebook can then tell if I saw an advert which led me to make a purchase.
That's just great. So I guess the gift that marketing agencies have given us is that we can't trust anybody. The only thing left to do is go entirely cash-only and never give any personal details to any business whatsoever.
The marketing industry has become so toxic that it is now poisoning everything.
The marketing industry is just an extension of human greed, which has a long history of ruining everything. Things don’t change. They just take on different forms.
Not sure how you got to that conclusion. A simple ad blocker and not using fb would solve this issue entirely. Transaction data like restaurant purchases is only useful in this scenario if it’s linkable to other online tracking data on you.
You've made the mistake of assuming that any significant fraction of the population even cares.
Whether or not anyone has this information is totally irrelevant to me, and I'd imagine this is true of upwards of 95% of the population. And hey, if it leads to restaurants bringing in more people, it'll lead to more restaurants I like staying open instead of going under...
I only had half a dozen, all from the last month. This is pretty surprising. I use Instagram regularly, though I only sign into Facebook occasionally.
All of the activity I had was from games that I casually installed and then deleted in the past month. These are games that I signed into with Google Play, which displayed advertisements primarily for Facebook.
Speaking of which, some of Facebook's advertisements are absurd.
"This is a summary of the 285 apps and websites that have shared your activity." hmmm, that's more than I expected. A lot of them are from sites which probably had a Facebook pixel on them.
I have LAN TIM 2 on my facebook account and I have never bought anything from spreadshirt.
Moreover my facebook account is just a dummy one which only has the bare minimum of information to own my business page, which I don't even post to (I have dedicated social media people who do that).
Facebook doesn't even have my phone number, only my name and my business email address.
I design Ad Tech systems, currently work as an architect for a DSP, and I deleted my Facebook accounts years ago. People who think they are privacy conscious and use Facebook are a living oxymoron.
You know better than anyone that deleting your fb account doesn’t really accomplish anything though. All you did was change some flag in their device graph.
Exactly ! I don't know why folks want to have it both ways - you cannot separate the good Facebook features from its bad privacy violating features - folks need to choose what shade of gray they are ok with.
Facebook started off as a very white shade of gray and has slowly turned to the dark side, getting darker and darker shades of gray until the present day, when they are nearly black, gamma channel 1/255.
When the game is at this stage it's better to just not play.
When an advertising platform has to pay fartsniffers to follow you around to offer marginally better ctr than email spam, maybe just don't run ads?
Work manually on growing networks of users, actually walk up to them and chat, talk in relevant business forums and you won't spend thousands of dollars you don't have casting a net in hopes of finding people who more likely than not just don't want to be associated with your practices.
Am I the only one who thinks it would be pretty cool to hook this up as SaaS product that sends me an alert when I get a new offline conversion? Kind of like how my credit card sends me a push notification when I get charged for something. I like the level of transparency it provides.
Then you could also do something on a case by case basis where you can click to say “I don’t want Facebook to have this offline conversion.”
I just checked, and have "LAN TIM 2" and "DiepTrinh" on my list.
The data from "LAN TIM 2" was sent to Facebook on the 5th of March 2020, yesterday that is.
The only stores I've shopped at lately were ALDI and EDEKA, and yesterday I bought a Webhosting offer directly at the hoster's site, no third party involved.
I have never bought a custom shirt.
What I do have is a Motorola G7 Plus, which is filled with uninstallable background services from Facebook. Two days ago I upgraded it to Android 10 and now all those background services, like "Facebook App Manager" or "Facebook Installer", "Facebook Services", all names which truly frighten me, are activated again. I had deactivated them months ago on Android 9 as soon as I got this phone. I really am wondering about the data this phone is pushing to Facebook without my consent.
I really wonder what caused those two entries, I never give any consent to any company to share my data.
God I hate Facebook, they are the cancer of the internet.
Based on some of the network analysis I did on my phone, I think this is related to Facebook's analytics engine. Most apps I've seen communicate with graph.facebook.com to send telemetry (when which screen was opened etc.).
It wouldn't be beyond Facebook to immediately connect that telemetry to your user profile, making these apps show up in your profile.
Root your phone and use a community made ROM? Vendor bloatware that comes with your phone is and always has been garbage. The only reason phone vendors have to develop and ship apps on their phones is to sell you out, to improve their unit economics.
This seems like a decent level of effort to build out especially if it’s to become an effective thing. What’s driving it, is it to show that facebook ads are delivering a total value in excess of the online conversions? Is this being done because there’s questions over Facebook ads value return? Are we sure that Facebook ads even do deliver good value prop, like is this program showing successful linkage / is that linkage ad-related or organic?
[+] [-] s3r3nity|6 years ago|reply
When there are $billions$ of dollars at stake for this type of information, you can guarantee there will be many companies attacking this problem.
Therefore, not to be a pessimist, but if you think that 1) using a fake cell number on Facebook is going to help or that 2) there aren't services like Google doing this already, potentially with just as good match rates as Facebook, or 3) that using Firefox + adblock is all you need, then you're going to be constantly plugging holes in a leaking boat.
[+] [-] londons_explore|6 years ago|reply
True, but the ad industry isn't like a boat. They don't want to track everything or build a complete profile about everyone. They just want to track most things and build a fairly complete profile about most people.
That means every privacy step you make has some incremental gains. Just because a private detective could use the collected data to build a complete profile of you, doesn't mean the ad company will - they'll collect data from the easiest sources, and if you make it too hard for them to get data about you, they'll simply collect data about other people.
[+] [-] 12xo|6 years ago|reply
If FB thinks you're a 72 yr old retired dentist from OK, and you buy nothing but feminine hygiene products and 3 wheel wheel barrels, you're pretty worthless as a consumer.
The future of ad block is disinformation. Makes the entire ecosystem worthless
[+] [-] snarf21|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangerface|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anovikov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexCoventry|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hammock|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easytiger|6 years ago|reply
Crikey. Just downloaded all the data and having a browse. 22k line location file (about 3k locations) stored too. I don't have the app installed on any device i own. I presumed the mobile page wouldn't have permission. Checking the data it does seem to stop when I changed phone (samsung preinstall fb app)
What are they doing with ancient location data?Also have every deliveroo purchase I've made in there they have an entry for every deliveroo purchase i've made
[+] [-] huhtenberg|6 years ago|reply
Do I read this correctly that a restaurant will just dump its complete visitor log to FB and then let FB "sort it out".
Meaning that FB gets to vacuum the info on everyone including those without FB accounts?
[+] [-] eli|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notyourday|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|6 years ago|reply
"It's just offline conversion events being uploaded so you'd stop getting these ads, or so they can market to you again in the future. You purchased this product, gave them a phone number.. Not sure where the issue lies? You agreed to the terms on Spreadshirt which is probably where you opted for marketing."
This is the basic approach. You give it to us. You agree to whatever we put in legalese and now we can do whatever we want. What?
It is disheartening, but I agree with the rest of the posts on HN that it is not at all surprising.
I just don't know how to approach it.
[+] [-] settsu|6 years ago|reply
> I have never used FaceBook [sic] login for anything
> Facebook doesn't even have my phone number, only my name and my business email address.
People, if any company has A-N-Y-thing that can be associated with you, online or offline, you have no privacy. None. It is gone forever.
There is billions of dollars at stake for companies to build as complete a picture as possible of you and every detail of your life. And billions more remains on the table. That is plenty motivation to fuel a highly-lucrative market for accurate, meaningful profiling for years.
Sure, there's a long list of actions you could take to begin minimizing your exposure, the practicality of each varying widely. But frankly, most of them would only serve to make going about daily life inconvenient. (And the correlation between effectiveness and convenience isn't 1:1...)
The best case scenario is your data becoming stale, such that its values diminishes to a degree that makes it effectively background noise.
There is simply no means of unembedding yourself. But also, more discouragingly, for most people there is no practical means to avoid being ingested.
edit: grammar
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
I'm actually quite (pleasantly) surprised that Facebook provides this information, and somewhat curious why the author is angry at them rather than "Lan Tim 2".
[+] [-] Username_TBD|6 years ago|reply
I use Firefox to avoid being tracked by Facebook, and never login with Facebook. But it looks like I slipped up in signing up for email receipts!
Even if I didn't have a Facebook account, Facebook would still be building a profile on me using my email address /phone number in anticipation of the day I made an account.
[+] [-] scottmcleod|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnFen|6 years ago|reply
That's just great. So I guess the gift that marketing agencies have given us is that we can't trust anybody. The only thing left to do is go entirely cash-only and never give any personal details to any business whatsoever.
The marketing industry has become so toxic that it is now poisoning everything.
[+] [-] b0rsuk|6 years ago|reply
http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html Advertising is a cancer on society (last update: 2019-10-02)
[+] [-] IAmGraydon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klyrs|6 years ago|reply
Good luck! Lots of brick&mortar stores are going to debit/credit only...
[+] [-] bawolff|6 years ago|reply
There is a reason why EU made the GDPR. Its not like it was a law meant to solve a purely theoretical problem
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mdorazio|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amyjess|6 years ago|reply
Whether or not anyone has this information is totally irrelevant to me, and I'd imagine this is true of upwards of 95% of the population. And hey, if it leads to restaurants bringing in more people, it'll lead to more restaurants I like staying open instead of going under...
[+] [-] bayareabronco|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|6 years ago|reply
All of the activity I had was from games that I casually installed and then deleted in the past month. These are games that I signed into with Google Play, which displayed advertisements primarily for Facebook.
Speaking of which, some of Facebook's advertisements are absurd.
https://i.redd.it/czyfotsak2l41.jpg
"Start Reacting Today".
[+] [-] XCSme|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fullstop|6 years ago|reply
Not bad!
[+] [-] blackearl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdamJacobMuller|6 years ago|reply
Moreover my facebook account is just a dummy one which only has the bare minimum of information to own my business page, which I don't even post to (I have dedicated social media people who do that).
Facebook doesn't even have my phone number, only my name and my business email address.
Very creepy.
[+] [-] DevKoala|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burkaman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soared|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepytimetea|6 years ago|reply
Facebook started off as a very white shade of gray and has slowly turned to the dark side, getting darker and darker shades of gray until the present day, when they are nearly black, gamma channel 1/255.
[+] [-] cfv|6 years ago|reply
When an advertising platform has to pay fartsniffers to follow you around to offer marginally better ctr than email spam, maybe just don't run ads?
Work manually on growing networks of users, actually walk up to them and chat, talk in relevant business forums and you won't spend thousands of dollars you don't have casting a net in hopes of finding people who more likely than not just don't want to be associated with your practices.
[+] [-] poorman|6 years ago|reply
Then you could also do something on a case by case basis where you can click to say “I don’t want Facebook to have this offline conversion.”
[+] [-] qwertox|6 years ago|reply
The data from "LAN TIM 2" was sent to Facebook on the 5th of March 2020, yesterday that is.
The only stores I've shopped at lately were ALDI and EDEKA, and yesterday I bought a Webhosting offer directly at the hoster's site, no third party involved.
I have never bought a custom shirt.
What I do have is a Motorola G7 Plus, which is filled with uninstallable background services from Facebook. Two days ago I upgraded it to Android 10 and now all those background services, like "Facebook App Manager" or "Facebook Installer", "Facebook Services", all names which truly frighten me, are activated again. I had deactivated them months ago on Android 9 as soon as I got this phone. I really am wondering about the data this phone is pushing to Facebook without my consent.
I really wonder what caused those two entries, I never give any consent to any company to share my data.
God I hate Facebook, they are the cancer of the internet.
[+] [-] smtpserver|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evanb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CollinEMac|6 years ago|reply
https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/future_activi...
[+] [-] misiti3780|6 years ago|reply
But raises a more important question: If you are reading this and don't like it - why do you still have a FB account?
[+] [-] notyourday|6 years ago|reply
Google Chromecast shares activity with facebook!
[+] [-] jeroenhd|6 years ago|reply
It wouldn't be beyond Facebook to immediately connect that telemetry to your user profile, making these apps show up in your profile.
[+] [-] raverbashing|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] literallycancer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awinder|6 years ago|reply