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[Reelya]

However, what's in Pocket is things you personally tagged.

There's really no evidence that Firefox is secretly using it to store your browsing history. If people's browsing history was being sent to Pocket then it would be blatantly obvious already, since they'd need to to all the Get or Post requests to Pocket to send the data. Since nobody's out of millions of users have said they're doing that then it's pretty clear they are not.

That article is also about an entirely different topic, which is about centralized and automated data collection which has the Id info removed, but could still be used to ID you. Let's see evidence that firefox is actually harvesting Pocket information. It's a bookmarking service, and there's no actual evidence or smoking gun that Firefox is harvesting the data from that, or that it's storing any information other than the bookmarks you chose to stick in there.

Those "recommended by pocket" things are different on different installs because they don't have anything in pocket, so it's choosing stuff at random. That's because Pocket isn't tracking you by IP address in the first place, Rolan7, nor is it tracking your entire browsing history. However, what it's probably doing is that it does spit out random bookmarks from other people's pockets based on similarity, so there is a bit of a privacy question in there, of should an anonymous bookmarking service be recommending other anon's bookmarks?

[wierd]

How or why Mozilla is involved (other than through a "We need money to survive yo" type arragement; and simply bundle the Pocket code for that reason alone, and whatever Pocket does is whatever Pocket does-- or if some other more nefarious deal is going on, I cannot say.

However, the Pocket code itself clearly does session-to-session data collection, as the material it curates changes based on what you click on. If it tracks anything outside of those "from the landing page clicks", I dont know. I have not tried to examine it under a microscope.


Also, not ENTIRELY apples to oranges for the quoted article.

The conditions presented by the article are:

Large database that contains your information inside it, but stripped of your unique ID.


This is functionally identical to "Large database of browsing habits, that lacks your unique ID."


Each instance of the pocket software does have a unique ID, but that is the ID of the pocket software installation, not of the profile being evaluated.  If you have firefox installed on say, 5 devices, but you have the same browsing habits on all 5 devices, the same correlation techniques can be used to consolidate all 5 of those "unique" datasets into a single, unified dataset, with increasing levels of predictive accuracy, the more datapoints that are tracked and correlated.

That was the point.


That is entirely possible, because Facebook was ACTIVELY DOING THAT.  That is exactly what a facebook "Shadow Profile" was.
https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-information-you-didnt-hand-over/

When you created a real facebook account, the backend would comb its shadow accounts to see if it found a close match, then ask some questions to verify-- then BOOM-- their shadow account (that they were indeed using for analytics purposes), suddenly has a real human ID with it.


But that's facebook. Their brazen disregard for actual user privacy is legendary.  We are discussing Pocket and Mozilla.  Pocket at least, must track "session to session, within the scope of a single instance ID, based tracking" in order for its curation feature to work.  I dont really feel like setting up trail tests to see if they are aggregating and consolidating in this capacity, but it would be pretty easy to test for.

[Reelya]

Yeah, but if your entire browsing history was being sent to pocket with every click someone would know about it and there would be articles. Firefox is open source and you can packet sniff. So it's clearly not doing that. It's just obviously not. Lots of people would have noticed and would be telling you about it.

If you want your browsing history sent to Mozilla you have to manually set up an account and set it to sync those things, but Pocket specifically isn't that thing.

[Mathel]

About the Book of the Faces: I had been forced to start using it for shool work on university. Somehow, it knows who my schoolmates from high school are. I had not created an account there back then, nor had I actually searched it that much. So it must have realised this from their communication about me.

[Eschar]

Spoiler: speaking of wasps, my uncle found this the other day in the attic of our cabin (click to show/hide)

It's supposedly around 60 cm

Did you also get a phone call from Wintermute?

About the Book of the Faces: I had been forced to start using it for shool work on university. Somehow, it knows who my schoolmates from high school are. I had not created an account there back then, nor had I actually searched it that much. So it must have realised this from their communication about me.

That's going in my "extremely fascinating but scary" list

[LordBaal]

Maybe somebody filled a list with names of your class, or facebook checked their email address contacts.

[scriver]

I haven't used Facebook in like ten years. My parents started using it in the meantime and as such aren't friends of mine on there. Some months ago a friend I made two or so years ago got my mum as a Facebook friend recommendation. Yeah, it's weird.

I'm assuming its some kind of telephone number comparison. It's the only way I can see it can have happened.

Spoiler: speaking of wasps, my uncle found this the other day in the attic of our cabin (click to show/hide)

It's supposedly around 60 cm

Did you also get a phone call from Wintermute?

This reference flew over the cuckoo's nest

[Eschar]

I haven't used Facebook in like ten years. My parents started using it in the meantime and as such aren't friends of mine on there. Some months ago a friend I made two or so years ago got my mum as a Facebook friend recommendation. Yeah, it's weird.

I'm assuming its some kind of telephone number comparison. It's the only way I can see it can have happened.

Spoiler: speaking of wasps, my uncle found this the other day in the attic of our cabin (click to show/hide)

It's supposedly around 60 cm

Did you also get a phone call from Wintermute?

This reference flew over the cuckoo's nest

Neuromancer. A wasp nest is used as a metaphor for Tessier-Ashpool and the AI Wintermute, and there's an iconic bit where a row of pay phones starts ringing in sequence as the main character walks past it (I think there's an homage to the same scene in Person of Interest).

[LordBaal]

I haven't used Facebook in like ten years. My parents started using it in the meantime and as such aren't friends of mine on there. Some months ago a friend I made two or so years ago got my mum as a Facebook friend recommendation. Yeah, it's weird.

I'm assuming its some kind of telephone number comparison. It's the only way I can see it can have happened.

Perhaps also IP and even MAC addresses? Other friends in common. It still worrisome.

[Jopax]

Recent package I ordered from Germany has tracking and it's baffling. It took them three days to process it in germany and get it to the import center in the capital of my country. There it spent about two hours before being sent off to the postal office in my city. That was two days ago, since then not a single update on the tracking and obviously no package or notice has arrived yet.

It's hillarious how it's easier to cross several thousand kilometers and a few borders than it is to cross a hundred kilometers in a single country :V

[Reelya]

I've noticed the same thing on occasion. What I think is that it's cost-minimization.

Say there's a truck every day taking stuff from the international freight depot to your city, it's a no-brainer that your thing gets sent in the next trip. It's a high-volume link. The same with the original dispatch. For example, the company that sold it shipped out a truckload of stuff and said "all of this stuff is going to France" (or insert country). There's no need to delay it, just pack the lot onto the next freight link to France.
 
But once your thing is in your city, they need to deliver it to a specific area. But that's a low-volume trip, so they wait a while until they have more stuff to deliver for your general vicinity then bundle everything into a single van-load then deliver it all at once. So the reason the delivery slows down as it gets close to you is because it's gone from the general to the specific: it started the journey as "stuff for a whole country" down to "stuff for a whole city" then "stuff for a specific street address".

[Jopax]

But there isn't a smaller specific unit in my city (there are smaller post offices but they don't handle recieving packages), all packages arrive either at the main post office (which is five minutes of walking from me) or if it's stuff that needs to go trough customs (which only applies to large/expensive things) it goes to the main freight office which is a ways off from the city. And that's it, from there all they need to do is process it to get the little notice slip and deliver that so that I know that I gotta pick the package up within a certain time. But this is pretty much blatant laziness/incompetence, that they haven't bothered even checking it in for the tracking in the two days that it's been here is telling enough because I seriously doubt that they're having such a massive volume of packages that they can't process them all within two days.

[Thunderforge]

Are you in the USA by any chance? 

[Reelya]

Amazon's launched their own fortnite/overwatch type game now. It is a train-wreck.

First up, the guy they put in charge of Amazon Games division doesn't have a game development background, he's a business major with a history in their online book selling division. Managers also have a tendency to staff positions with like-minded people, so you can bet that the top few levels of the Amazon Games machine are all business and marketing major suits, with a layer of Amazon techies in the middle, and the actual creatives being the disposable talent.

Second the brand's tagline is "Amazon Games develops games that harness the power of AWS and Twitch to create bold, new game experiences. Come play with us". So rather than just making games everything is about "how can we leverage AWS here for this functionality?" to showcase AWS, this is also where staffing the entire thing with Amazon techies comes in. No right-minded games programmer builds the whole thing off of AWS, which is a big thing in the business world, not so big with actual game development, at all.

Third, they decided that how you make an action/shooter game is you ask twitch streamers what things (weapons, monsters, etc) they like in the games they're already playing, then you just throw one of each of those into a game engine, stir a bit, then you got a game, and you're going to like it plebs, because it's got all your favorite stuff in there, do a little QA and a little A/B testing, run some focus groups and marketing, and you're done! Instant hit game!

Except it looks like a steaming pile of last years turds.

[Kagus]

--snip--

Oh lord, I've gotta go sniff this thing out, that sounds incredible!