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F/book. OUT of there.
#18481 10/17/11 03:18 PM
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After much pressure from relatives, and with great reluctance I joined F/book at the weekend. I cannot possibly use my real name as it is so singular, but my chosen nom de plume identified me to my own relatives. They never had my real name, real date of birth, real location or any other identifer which is user-supplied.

I carefully checked all the security settings and deleted cookies every time I exited.

Today I went back in there on a different computer for a final search for a sisterinlaw who had been nagging me to join. Yet again I failed to find her. While I was hunting around, F/book suggested that I use another search tool, which I clicked upon.

To my horror, another window opened and it said "You also have this yahoo account. Give us permission to look in there for your friends."

F/book had NEVER been told of that Yahoo account of mine. It was obviously NOT the one I had used to register. Furthermore, it is not a Yahoo account which any of my relatives use: it is a back-up work account and rarely used.

If that isn't the creepiest computer experience I've ever had, I can't think of one which beats it. My F/book account has now been deleted. Somehow I doubt that that will stop them spying on me/my computer/s but I've done my best.

Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Bensheim #18483 10/17/11 04:09 PM
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And assembled multitudes thought I was paranoid about Facebook and its ilk.
(Not that you are. You just confirmed exactly what my fears were/are. Oh yes, and the cloud is a good thing, says Big Brother.)

Re: F/book. OUT of there.
grelber #18486 10/17/11 04:29 PM
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I was very (healthily IMO) paranoid about F/book before this.

I already knew that anyone who can see any pictures you put up, can copy them/screen grab them - obviously without your knowledge let alone consent.

I already knew that once you put photos up there, you don't own the copyright any more. They do.

I already knew never to let them into your email account - whichever one you pick to register with.

I already knew that I had to "friend" my own relatives and wait for them to accept the "friend".

What I didn't know, however, apart from this appalling demonstration to me today that they somehow know about my non-F/book Yahoo accounts, was that when you browse for people - relatives in my case - they offer you complete strangers to "friend" who are on your relative's lists. Complete strangers. Never heard of them.

But F/book knows that someone you're searching for, knows them.

Why the F would I want to contact a complete stranger just because a cousin of mine knows him somehow?

The whole place gave me the heebyjeebies. Even closing the account takes some effort - 3 different popup windows, multiple requests for password, AND typing in the random-generated words back to them, and multiple attempts to make you say why. I lacked the nerve to tell them to eff off.


Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Bensheim #18487 10/17/11 04:38 PM
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Originally Posted By: Bensheim
What I didn't know, however, apart from this appalling demonstration to me today that they somehow know about my non-F/book Yahoo accounts

Probably just by reading your cookie file. I bet tacit or any admin here could do the same (if they wanted to).


Originally Posted By: Bensheim
when you browse for people - relatives in my case - they offer you complete strangers to "friend" who are on your relative's lists. Complete strangers. Never heard of them.

"Friends of friends" -- in some cases total strangers, in some cases ex-lovers.

What's the big whoop?

Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Hal Itosis #18488 10/17/11 05:01 PM
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There was no F/book cookie, as I have quite clearly said.

I ALWAYS CLEAR COOKIES before and after going to f/book.

Now that you've told me that, Hal, I'll clear cookies everytime I come here, too.

There, just done that before posting this.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is a terrible shame to me that people should be so suspicious of any Admin on this, of all sites. Thank you.

Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Bensheim #18490 10/17/11 05:53 PM
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I've been thinking about this and reckon that Hal has done this forum a great disservice. He has put into my mind and anyone else who reads this, that the Admins of this forum may, can, and perhaps do

look at member's cookies to examine their browsing activities.

I already know that this forum uses Statcounter or similar, and I have no problem with that: I use it on my own website.

I would have thought that Adminning this forum is hardly a full-time job, given the low traffic. However the seed of doubt has now been planted. Maybe some of the multiple Mods are so underoccupied that they do look at the content of user cookies? Just as F/book may do.

Having said that, I have my browsing history here on this particular Mac. Today was the first time I went to f/book on this Mac. I still don't know how they KNEW of my other Yahoo account but it's scared me enough to make me clear cookies for every single website before AND after going there. (Right now the only cookies enabled are google and this one, which I had to enable in order to log in. I'll clear it when I've finished this post.)

This is Not Good. Thanks, Hal. And I'd appreciate some reassurance from Admin/Mods for what it's worth.


Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Bensheim #18491 10/17/11 06:34 PM
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Originally Posted By: Bensheim
There was no F/book cookie, as I have quite clearly said.

I ALWAYS CLEAR COOKIES before and after going to f/book.

I'm talking about your Yahoo cookies. Did you clear those too?

Anyway, it doesn't have to be the cookie file. I'm no webmaster, but there are probably other avenues by which a website can determine the email identities of its visitors.

At least such would come as no surprise to me.

Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Hal Itosis #18494 10/17/11 06:54 PM
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I've found this and it gives me no comfort whatsoever:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-fixes-cookie-behavior-after-logging-out/4120

I have now proved conclusively that F/book keeps your cookies for Days. Fortunately the Mac I was on earlier (when all this happened) had never had Firefox history changed from default. I had to go back FIVE days to find a previous 3-second visit to f/book.


Therefore, despite having cleared cookies before I went there today, they had my browsing history nailed. From 5 days ago.


F/book has to be the most sinister place on earth. And thanks to this, my already understandable fear (from having been stalked on the internet a few years ago) is now reinforced even further. I have gone around the office fixing every Mac's browser not to accept 3rd party cookies, clearing history, and asking every time before accepting any site cookies. All thanks to F/book.

There are millions of people using that place who presumably have no idea what is going on, on their own computers, by them.

How stupidly naive they are, and I was.



Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Bensheim #18498 10/17/11 08:05 PM
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Well... i'll wait for more knowledgable folks to post with detailed answers.

But none of what you indicate is either surprising or anywhere near as "bad" as your perception of it.

What exactly are you afraid of?

[i mean: they're not gonna steal your credit card or anything like that. you might as well stay the heck away from google.com too -- if having your "movements" tracked creeps you out.]


Last edited by Hal Itosis; 10/17/11 08:10 PM.
Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Bensheim #18505 10/17/11 11:52 PM
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Facebook is making me paranoid, but for personal reasons I still have a FFB account. However I only access FB using a browser I have dedicated to that purpose alone and I never visit any site other than FB.

Personally I cannot imagine any reason why I would want to examine an FTM members browsing habits and I deeply resent the implication that I, or any of my colleagues, might do so.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Bensheim #18514 10/18/11 05:52 AM
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Originally Posted By: Bensheim
I already knew that once you put photos up there, you don't own the copyright any more. They do.


That's actually not correct, though it's a common misconception. It's based on a misunderstanding of the Terms of Service.

if you upload a picture to Facebook, you give them an irrevocable license to store and transmit the picture. You have to; after all, you're asking them to...err, store and transmit. The idea is that you can't upload a picture and then sue them for copyright infringement because they have it on their server.

Giving them a license, however, absolutely does not mean transferring the copyright to them. You still own the copyright; you haven't given it away.

Originally Posted By: Bensheim
What I didn't know, however, apart from this appalling demonstration to me today that they somehow know about my non-F/book Yahoo accounts, was that when you browse for people - relatives in my case - they offer you complete strangers to "friend" who are on your relative's lists. Complete strangers. Never heard of them.


Most likely, they know about the Yahoo account because they see the Yahoo cookie.

A lot o folks tend to form networked social communities; statistically, if someone you know knows someone else, the odds are better than even that you know that person, too. You can always decline to try to contact friends of friends.

I don't use Facebook (except as a repository for my Twitter feed), though I don't find that behavior especially creepy. There's other Facebook behavior I reserve that term for. smile


Photo gallery, all about me, and more: www.xeromag.com/franklin.html
Re: F/book. OUT of there.
joemikeb #18519 10/18/11 06:33 AM
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Originally Posted By: joemikeb
Personally I cannot imagine any reason why I would want to examine an FTM members browsing habits and I deeply resent the implication that I, or any of my colleagues, might do so.

That probably wasn't Bensheim's intent.

As far as my part, i never asked why or implied anything. The ONLY issue was whether or not it's possible to do so (which you both beautifully evaded answering). wink [though —in a way —those responses almost imply a "yes".]

Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Bensheim #18520 10/18/11 06:37 AM
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@Bensheim: see if this Terminal command produces any useful output:
grep $LOGNAME ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist


--

As far as facebook... what i find most irritating are the plethora of 3rd-party apps that take advantage of naive users who leave all their access settings wide open. But with my restricted settings, the rogue apps never gets to see my friends list... so it stops there. Then i just clean the nonsense off my wall and block that app totally, forever.

Harmless but annoying. (well, harmless to Safari/Apple OS so far.)

Last edited by Hal Itosis; 10/18/11 06:59 AM.
Re: F/book. OUT of there.
tacit #18524 10/18/11 09:25 AM
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> A lot o folks tend to form networked social communities; statistically, if someone you know knows someone else, the odds are better than even that you know that person, too. You can always decline to try to contact friends of friends.

I don't do Facebook...period, but I once got a "friend" request, and two of the three extraneous people I was offered were people whom I know but who had absolutely -0- connection with the original "friender," and the one to whom I've spoken swears that I'm not mentioned anywhere in his account.

Can you see any way that may be possible?


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: F/book. OUT of there.
artie505 #18527 10/18/11 10:08 AM
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Well, if your email address is in the address books of those extraneous people you know, and they have at some point used Facebook's "friend finder," a feature which peruses their address books for matches with name/email address combos already in the FB database, then when the would-be friender entered your name/email address combo, FB likely matched it up with info already in the database ("hey, we already have an artie505@whatever.net—in the address books of Paul Extraneous and Art Extraneous—so let's try to get these good folks together on Facebook").

One can choose to find this unauthorized bandying about of one's email address sinister (although the friends/acquaintances who used "friend finder" provided authorization by proxy; does that make them sinister?), but with 10% of the world's population using Facebook, techniques for figuring out who really knows whom might, alternatively, be regarded as essential.

Anyone who's tried to find his or her long-lost college roomie Bill Clark, only to give up after the first four or five hundred Bill Clarks returned by a Facebook search, might appreciate seeing the correct Bill Clark proffered as a potential friend, without being too alarmed by the implications such magic carries regarding the data manipulation going on behind the scenes.



dkmarsh—member, FineTunedMac Co-op Board of Directors
Re: F/book. OUT of there.
dkmarsh #18532 10/18/11 01:03 PM
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There was no sequence of events like that.

I had joined f/book 24 hours earlier and had used an assumed name (as stated in post 1). Let's for the sake of this thread, say that I used "Blue Sky".

The email address which f/book revealed that they knew was mine, is a Business-only back-up. (as stated earlier.) No relatives have ever used it. It could not be in any of their own address books on their own computers, with my real name next to it or associated with it.

There is no way of searching for me, using my real name, on f/book, since I do not exist on f/book in that or (now) any other name.

Even if any relatives had seen their "friend" requests from Blue Sky, whatever they did next would still not have linked "Blue Sky's" membership there, to my Yahoo business email address.

F/book, not having my real name at any point, have no way of associating me with the back-up business email address at Yahoo.

The only possible explanation is that they used a five-days old cookie to this computer, where they found ME using that Yahoo log-in.

I call that spying, and very overt spying now that they have proved that they do that. It is none of their goddammed business what I do on my own computer, off their site, days earlier. At that point I was NOT a member of their repulsive site and had only visited for a few seconds, five days earlier. Yes, I do call this sinister and it should be a criminal offence.

I also continue to be upset that another member of this forum has planted the seed of doubt that Admins here could look at other people's cookies to snoop on our internet browsing too. I am still waiting for someone in authority to unambiguously deny this, not only to me but to every other of this forum too.

Until I have such assurance, it is a dammed nuisance having to delete cookies for FTM every time I log out.

Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Hal Itosis #18533 10/18/11 01:36 PM
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Quote:
ONLY issue was whether or not it's possible to do so (which you both beautifully evaded answering). [though —in a way —those responses almost imply a "yes".

If there is a way to do that, I have no idea what it is.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Bensheim #18536 10/18/11 02:38 PM
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Originally Posted By: Bensheim
I also continue to be upset that another member of this forum has planted the seed of doubt that Admins here could look at other people's cookies to snoop on our internet browsing too. I am still waiting for someone in authority to unambiguously deny this, not only to me but to every other of this forum too.

Until I have such assurance, it is a dammed nuisance having to delete cookies for FTM every time I log out.

Dude... it has nothing to do with "admins here".
Any
website, anywhere can read your cookie file.
Did you run the Terminal command i gave you?

You think that's bad? Go back about 10 years when our [forums] login passwords (also in the cookie file) were sometimes stored there unencrypted. shocked

Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey. grin

Last edited by Hal Itosis; 10/18/11 02:57 PM.
Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Hal Itosis #18540 10/18/11 03:02 PM
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Originally Posted By: Hal Itosis

Dude... it has nothing to do with "admins here".

You are the one who first suggested this, not me.

Post 18487 "Probably just by reading your cookie file. I bet tacit or any admin here could do the same (if they wanted to)."

Quote:

Did you run the Terminal command i gave you?


In 25 years of using Macs I have never had to use a Terminal command, have no idea what they are, how to do them, and what if anything they show; I see no reason to start now.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
According to Firefox, FTM has now put 5 cookies on my computer.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Quote:
You think that's bad? Go back about 10 years when our login passwords (also in the cookie file) were sometimes stored there unencrypted. shocked

Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey. grin


10 years ago is hardly relevant.

Thank you for your sarcasm / irony / wit / taunt. Delete as appropriate.

Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Bensheim #18542 10/18/11 04:07 PM
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No interest in FACEBOOK. Never have; never (knowingly?) will.

P.S. Even the idea of iCLOUD doesn't sit all that well with me. Storing my own computer contents somewhere "out there" just doesn't feel quite right - although I certainly can see its appeal to some folks in respect to convenience, etc. Not that I have any deep dark secrets to hide wink . . . but I am trying to hang on to whatever remnants of privacy remain in this techno-cyber age! smile

But I digress . . . Getting back to the topic of cookies/cache . . . There are several apps mentioned throughout this Forum which can help to some degree in removing these items (Onyx, etc. - some free, some not). Check out these and see if any of them make cleanup of the unwanted tracks a little bit easier for you.

Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Hal Itosis #18544 10/18/11 04:37 PM
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Originally Posted By: Hal Itosis
@Bensheim: see if this Terminal command produces any useful output:
grep $LOGNAME ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist

I ran that command and only got: firstname-lastnames-imac:~ firstnamelastname$

What does that tell me? Thanks.


ryck

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Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Hal Itosis #18545 10/18/11 04:43 PM
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Ran your command:

Code:
Last login: Sun Oct 16 20:05:03 on ttys000
Artie-s-Computer-4:~ artie$ ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist
-bash: /Users/artie/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist: Permission denied
Artie-s-Computer-4:~ artie$ 

What, if anything, does "Permission denied" mean as respects Bensheim's upset?


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: F/book. OUT of there.
ryck #18546 10/18/11 04:48 PM
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Originally Posted By: ryck
I ran that command and only got: firstname-lastnames-imac:~ firstnamelastname$

What does that tell me? Thanks.

Not much it seems. Results will depend on which sites you allow to store cookie data... and what data they decide to put there. It's all pretty arbitrary.

In my case i can see all three of my e-mail addresses as stored by three separate (unrelated) websites.


Re: F/book. OUT of there.
artie505 #18548 10/18/11 04:51 PM
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Originally Posted By: artie505
Ran your command:

Code:
Last login: Sun Oct 16 20:05:03 on ttys000
Artie-s-Computer-4:~ artie$ ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist
-bash: /Users/artie/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist: Permission denied
Artie-s-Computer-4:~ artie$ 

What, if anything, does "Permission denied" mean as respects Bensheim's upset?

I don't understand your question " as respects Bensheim's upset? " ???

Anyway, you did not run my command (only part of it).
You got a "permission denied" error because the cookie file itself is not executable.

Re: F/book. OUT of there.
Bensheim #18550 10/18/11 04:58 PM
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Originally Posted By: Bensheim
You are the one who first suggested this, not me.

I was just giving an example. I figured you could extrapolate the obvious. Did you honestly think only FTM and Facebook can read a cookie file?


Originally Posted By: Bensheim
In 25 years of using Macs I have never had to use a Terminal command, have no idea what they are, how to do them, and what if anything they show; I see no reason to start now.

Good. Stay blind. [or use TextEdit or perhaps better TextWrangler... only $LOGNAME won't work there, so you'll need to search for your shortname]


Originally Posted By: Bensheim
10 years ago is hardly relevant.

i'm just pointing out that (assuming you've been surfing that long) that you've been exposed for over a decade. So why the sudden fit of paranoia?


Originally Posted By: Bensheim
Thank you for your sarcasm / irony / wit / taunt. Delete as appropriate.

You're taking EVERYTHING in this thread way too personally. crazy

These are just technical facts being discussed here. Chillax man. cool

Last edited by Hal Itosis; 10/18/11 05:06 PM.
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