Facebook tool Centra tracks all a user’s accounts, including anything they upload, to study not just their contacts but their behaviour.
Facebook “marks” photos, links and documents that a user may share, in order to track them them not just on Facebook but across the entire Internet. Hint: apparently you can spot this data in a url. It comes after the & and you should delete it.
Twitter and Facebook chiefs faced some difficult questions this week, for a change. Ted Cruz has emerged as one of the few senators willing to challenge them.
Sen Josh Hawley put Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on the spot for tracking and tracing its users. If you want just the meat of the hearing, watch this clip https://youtu.be/GzwIQ-69kiY?t=3019 otherwise the highlights are here:
JH: What is the Facebook internal tool called Centra?
MZ: I’m not aware of any tool with that name.
JH: Let me see if this refreshes your memory. There is a demonstrative
over my shoulder,” Hawley noted. “Centra is a tool that Facebook uses to
track its users not just on Facebook, but across the entire internet.
Centra tracks different profiles that a user visits, their message
recipients, their linked accounts, the pages they visit around the Web
that have Facebook buttons. Centra also uses behavioral data to monitor
users’ accounts, even if those accounts are registered under a different
name.
The NYT’s long article covering the Senate grilling contained no mention of Centra, one mention of censorship and four mentions of bias. The BBC’s propaganda and censorship by omission is disguised in the same way. There is a hearty debate about bias, which is the least of the problems: a viewer can correct for bias. They cannot correct for something that’s simply not been reported at all.
This kind of secrecy and defensiveness only encourages suspicions about who really runs Facebook, which was launched on the same day, Feb 4, 2004, that the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency retired LifeLog.
There's a browser extension called Facebook Container which restricts Facebook to the tab you've got open. This supposedly stops it scraping data about what else you are doing in your browser session. You can check which of your data Facebook is tracking with the ‘Off-Facebook Activity’ tool.
More on Centra here.
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