The creepiest thing I have seen online lately

Stu Pocknee

07 Mar 2020

internet , facebook , social media

FB WTF?

I am not a conspiracy theorist type of bloke. Not online. Not offline. Not anywhere. It’s not that I think that conspiracies don’t exist, it’s just that I’m confident that my existence is not remarkable enough to ever be wrapped up in anything so excitingly fringe as a good conspiracy. I’m more of a Hanlon’s razor type of guy.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

Equally, I’m not overly paranoid about my own online privacy. Frankly, if someone has nothing better to do than dig through my private life I would tend to pity their life’s lack of useful purpose rather than resent them. I am perfectly confident that the depressingly monochromatic details of my private life will not decrease their boredom quotient in any appreciable way.

Today, as part of my daily perusal of Hacker News I branched off to an article ‘Who is Facebook's mysterious "Lan Tim 2"?’. Definitely a good click-baity sort of title and it sucked me right in. The salient information here is that page led me to my ‘https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/activity_list’ page.

Wow. WTF is going on here? 696 sites and apps have shared my activity with Facebook? FFS, what is that about?

I don’t know why Facebook cares about my activity on other sites. I am supposing that it’s something to do with creating a profile on me to help with targeting advertising. Perhaps it feeds into some AI to help introduce me to groups and other Facebook activities pages they think I would like - improving their site stickiness. Perhaps they don’t use it at all, maybe they purely collect in case it is useful at some point. Or maybe they don’t use it at all but feel like they have to list sites that use their scripts as part of their trust improvement strategy. There are explanations regarding this in some of the dialogs relating to turning off their tracking (see the end of this blog). None of these carefully vague corporate-speak placations engender great confidence.

Scrolling through the list (sorry I didn’t finish it, things to do, blogs to write) I was struck by two things:

1. I don't remember visiting a lot of these sites
2. I doubt very much whether many of these sites even know they share data with Facebook, much less if and how it is being used

• On 1 - I visit a lot of sites as ‘once off’ links from blog aggregators like Hacker News, so it’s not surprising to me that I would not recognize or remember a specific site I have visited. Also I suppose that (given the interlinking that is pervasive on the ‘net and the way one page can be embedded in another) I may not even realize I have “visited” a page.
• On 2 - ‘Chesterfield Australia’ shares my activity with Facebook? ‘Crop Consultants Australia’ shares my activity with Facebook? I have a hard time believing sites like these have consciously decided to share my activity on their sites with Facebook - and certainly not for some material gain to them.

Clearly a lot of these must be due to the web page owners inserting some Facebook javascript to display posts, or to link back to their Facebook page, or to display a ‘Like’ button. I was kind of surprised not to find T3RRA in the list. I think we have some sort of script for displaying our FB feed. Yes, I did Ctrl-F search for it.

A quick look at the external domains Chesterfield Australia relies on¹

Is this Facebook tracking of my web activity totally benign? Dunno. Quite possibly. It’s not like I haven’t realized that this was going on. But to be presented so starkly with a list of all the places Facebook knows I have been is the creepiest thing I have seen online lately. They do give you an option to turn this off. Did I? Yes. Does that make me paranoid? Probably. Is it going to affect my FB use? Dunno, I’m not a big user anyway (or perhaps, given that 696 sites and apps are ‘reporting’ my activities to Facebook, I actually am!)