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    skade avatar skade 3 years ago | link | on: Facebook sending 'nonposts' to its servers and storing unpublished thoughts

    This is not news at all, sadly. It’s been known and covered since at least 2013.

    http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/12/facebook_self_censorship_what_happens_to_the_posts_you_don_t_publish.html

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      the-kenny avatar the-kenny 3 years ago | link

      The only thing I wonder about is why people still get surprised about this. It’s facebook. It’s the company that’s tracking you on basically every website you visit. Even when you’re not logged in.

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        andreyf avatar andreyf 3 years ago | link

        I think it’s wise to try to be aware of and not reinforce “facebook is creepy and everything they do is evil by default” bias. Any key presses, scrolling, or mouse movements on a website can be sent to the server. This is the nature of the browser. If you don’t want a website to have access to something, don’t type it into the website!

        1. pushcx avatar pushcx 3 years ago | link

          [Comment removed by author]

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            tedu avatar tedu 3 years ago | link

            Don’t we already have them? You can send messages to someone with email (which, if you’re all old school like me and use a local client, doesn’t transmit anything until you send it). You can at least choose to build websites that don’t have any facebook integration, like lobsters. You have perhaps somewhat less choice in the sites you visit, though.

            I’m entirely sure what you mean by “this sort of thing” or how one could build systems where it’s not possible. Do you want to disable javascript? Cross domain links? img tags?

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              ssl avatar ssl 3 years ago | link

              Actually, I do block 3rd party js by default, and facebook and google are on a special blacklist for images and css. I love uBlock.

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            nir avatar nir 3 years ago | link

            It’s the company that’s tracking you on basically every website you visit. Even when you’re not logged in.

            Curious what you mean by this, the-kenny?

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              tedu avatar tedu 3 years ago | link

              “Facebook shadow profile”

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                xmc avatar xmc e-mailed 3 years ago | link

                Shadow profiles, coupled with the ubiquitous ‘Like’ button.

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            tedu avatar tedu 3 years ago | link | on: Facebook sending 'nonposts' to its servers and storing unpublished thoughts

            Did I miss something in the gif? The quote says it sends back metadata, but the article says it contains the text of the post. I can’t see the text in the debugger though. What’s the actual content of the post?

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              enn avatar enn 3 years ago | link

              I just tried this. It sends the full text.

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                andreyf avatar andreyf 3 years ago | link

                The url it hits is /structured_suggestion, although I’m not able to get the server to respond with anything meaningful. If one is to discard the “facebook is creepy by default” bias, it seems reasonable to conclude that there’s some useful feature for suggestions based on your posts that can’t easily be implemented in the client (as URL and friend’s name recognition is).

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                andreyf avatar andreyf 3 years ago | link

                At the time the quoted article was written it only sent back metadata, now it sends back the whole text.