Do you know The Cookie Monster?

By Gnasher

I never knew him as well as I do now, thanks to HubSpot for making it clearer for me. They shared a blogpost with me, which contained the following key bit of text.

What’s the difference between a first party and a third party cookie?

The difference between first- and third- party cookies is how they’re saved and who can see them. When a website saves a cookie, it’s given a domain. If the domain on the cookie matches the domain of the website setting it, it’s a first party cookie. If the domain is different, it’s a third party cookie. First party cookies can only be seen when on the website that set it, where third party cookies are visible from any website.

This is why most ad tools use third party cookies; they enable a tool to track a user across multiple websites, and they can use that cross-site data from any other website to tailor ads.

One specific example:

Let’s say you’re on a website, a.com. It’s an ecommerce business. You put something in your shopping cart. When you come back later, the site remembers you, and keeps your same items in the shopping card. That’s the result of a first party cookie doing its job. The cookie was set by the same domain you’re on.

On the other hand, let’s say you’re on a.com, and the page you’re on contains an iframe from a different website (b.com). Cookies set by b.com accessed from an a.com page are third-party cookies. Accessing them from a.com is a cross-site request. This iframe might show you an ad via Doubleclick — — they track you across multiple websites, and serve you ads wherever you go online.

Every single time I click on a news story, that someone has shared on social media and I click through to the news website, I am confronted with a massive cookie notice, rendering the news story impossible to read. Of course most of us just agree to the notice, because we’re so hungry for that news story. But you have no idea that they are sharing your cookie with hundreds and maybe even thousands of vendors (that’s what they call them), actually advertisers, names you have never ever heard of all across the globe.

I did a video for you, so you can see for yourself and of course Facebook is complicit too, because they add an extra bit of spice on top of the tracking process with the Facebook Pixel. That way doesn’t matter if you’re active on Facebook or even have an account, they will track you off line as well.

[embed]https://youtu.be/nWUwZ2IXRqM[/embed]

The web has become an ugly and evil marketplace, the desperation of making money off every single visitor to your website has made the surfing experience a total waste of time. The TV once again has become attractive, I’m talking of course about the channels that do not serve ads, but that means we’re still paying aren’t we? Maybe an Internet that needs to be paid for, like your Spotify and Netflix could be a better future?

Happy surfing!

Michael de Groot

ps. My discussion on LinkedIn below.

[embed]https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stayingaliveuk_thats-it-ive-had-it-im-never-again-clicking-activity-6636525673294905344-Axdk[/embed]

The tech revolution — hurting or helping?

Hugh MacLeod

Well that depends on the eye of the beholder, the person who just was trolled, spammed, hacked or they had their private data stolen, because they trusted Facebook or Google or Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram and all of the others who exist and don’t exist yet.

When you have a service, which is free to the user and the prime objective is to get as many eyeballs as possible on the platform, so they can parade it in front of advertisers, you have just created a toxic recipe for disaster.

Why?

Because now the same platform that has billions of users, becomes very attractive to governments at large. Ever wondered why not one single government in the world has taken any serious action against Facebook? Because they all want access to the public data. I have sat through presentations where cyber security professionals can walk all over Facebook in nano-seconds and deliver the kind of intelligence on people they would have only dreamt of years ago. Mark Zuckerberg will be loved and hated always.

Loved because now criminals and charities can get in front of millions. Loved because governments are able to manipulate audiences. Brexit and Trump come to mind and they are the ones that grab the headlines.

If you believe that Facebook can police the millions of users that create bad stuff, the so-called bad actors, think again and again and again. They may tell us they have employed thousands of employees staring at screens, trying to catch the bad actors.

What’s the solution Michael?

It’s so simple, you will be amazed why it has never been done before.

Verification!

Instead of spending millions on having people stare at screens, trying to catch bad people in the act, good luck with that, have them spend the time verifying every single user, whether existing or new and especially the new (hacking) kind.

Everyone should have a verification tick. Governments can do it with all citizens, well most of them anyway, so why can’t these platforms adopt the same approach.

Sure it will slow down the user growth and billions of dollars of income, but it sure would be a guarantee that bad actors would find it much harder to keep adding fake accounts all over the place.

Yeah I know, it will never happen!

Happy scrolling!

@stayingaliveuk

ps. And then I found Yoti and kiwanja on here.

Privacy

Privacy is dead, it’s official. Even when you delete all your data everywhere you know it’s being held, your data will be there until way after your death. It’s like plastic. Tiny little microscopic particles of your data will live on forever.

Well at least until we blow up the earth or it self-destructs into a fireball of internet mayhem.

After watching a 2013 documentary “Terms and Conditions May Apply” on Netflix, realising it was released 5 years ago and probably made a few years earlier then that, I now know without a shadow of doubt that my data, which I so willingly shared with so many websites and organisations, is being used and abused the world over.

The worst thing is I don’t even know how it’s being used and what profits are being made as a result.

I was the Social Media and Internet advocate, I was so excited and delighted when I first discovered it all, so happy that now we could talk to people all over the world and make relationships with strangers we’d never met previously at the drop of a hat. or maybe I should call it the ‘data hat’ or is it ‘data hack’?

Actually who cares, billions of people now adore the internet and in order to use it successfully, we have to give away every tiny bit of data about ourselves.

Happy surfing!

Michael de Groot

Monopoly

I received this email from Citizens Against Monopoly.
A new story from the New York Times exposes yet another way Mark Zuckerberg has abused user trust to build Facebook into a social-network juggernaut. Facebook secretly “struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information.”

Facebook gave the over 60 companies — including Apple, Blackberry, Samsung, Amazon, and Microsoft — “access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders.”

The full list of companies isn’t known.

These secret agreements look like clear violations of the 2011 consent decree Facebook signed with the Federal Trade Commission.

Facebook Inc. enjoys social networking market dominance, with strong majorities of Americans using one or a combination of its desktop and mobile products, which now include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

Relatedly, Facebook holds a dominant market position in online advertising due in part to the unregulated collection of user activities through its social-media and tracking products and through data-sharing agreements with other data aggregators.

Story after story is now revealing that Facebook built that its dominance through repeated violations of user privacy and deliberate negligence — or, as Mark Zuckerberg himself liked to call it, by “moving fast and breaking things.”

As Rep. David Cicilline said, “Sure looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress about whether users have ‘complete control’ over who sees our data on Facebook.”

The five members of the Federal Trade Commission, which is the part of our government tasked with overseeing Facebook, has the authority and power to make Facebook safe for our democracy. Armed with the 2011 consent decree, the FTC has the immediate power to impose remedies that will break up Facebook’s monopoly power, give us the freedom to communicate across networks, and protect our privacy.

Together, we will make sure that they do.

Read the New York Times story.

Share the news widely.

Thank you,

Citizens Against Monopoly

CAM is a growing movement to protect America’s (and maybe the world’s) economy and democracy from corporate monopolies that undermine opportunity, competition, choice, and freedom of expression.

ps.

Facebook has a fantastic hack for businesses who wish to advertise directly to you (said sarcastically). All they need is either your email address or phone number and upload that list to Facebook. So now you’ve become a laser targeted object of adverts from people or companies you know. By the way this is not a suggestion to go and do this, but I understand this might happen too. It’s to highlight that once you’re on a list, they can do with it what they wish. Now, you can remove yourself from those lists, although it may already be too late, watch the video on how they do this. You need to go to settings in Facebook, select ‘Ads’, 4th items from the bottom to undo all those companies who have you in their list. Enjoy!

[embed]https://youtu.be/6uOdeWJsF10[/embed]

Michael de Groot

God Does PR

God regrets sending GDPR emails — Michael & Josh — #weeklycartoon

To date I have received exactly 99 emails on #GDPR and #privacy policies and they are still arriving every day. The biggest mistake is people asking me to opt back in. Of course I’m not going to do that, silly question. It inspired our latest cartoon simply titled ‘God Does PR’, get it? 😂

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wXmQbGY32U[/embed]

Michael de Groot