Usual story: go into the Facebook advertising preferences, spot organizations that I’ve never dealt with somehow possessing private information about me that they’ve uploaded to Facebook. One noticeable one was Afterpay, both its Australian office (no reply on Twitter) and the ‘Afterpay USA Business Manager’ (the US office did reply). @AfterpayUSA I don’t even […]
Tag: privacy
What I do when someone uploads my private information on to Facebook
I can’t be the only person who does this. This is one of the few things that I do on Facebook. Removing off-Facebook activity is another. 1. Let me check my Facebook advertising preferences. Who has been uploading my private information to Facebook without my permission? Hmm, Ramp, @rampcard, that’s new. I’ve […]
Read More… from What I do when someone uploads my private information on to Facebook
Admiral doesn’t understand that I’m not blocking ads, only trackers
It’s pretty bad that Admiral, which detects whether you are using an ad blocker or not, now advises this with Privacy Badger. Let me make this very clear: I am not against advertising on websites. I have advertising on our websites. I am against tracking by people such as Google. And that is […]
Read More… from Admiral doesn’t understand that I’m not blocking ads, only trackers
Cream cheese bagels make them angry
When I was in NYC in the summer of 2001, I stood at a Lower Manhattan bakery trying to order a cream cheese bagel for a friend of mine. The proprietor was busy making something. After close to five minutes’ waiting the counter, I asked if I could be served. His response: ‘You want to […]
You can remove and turn off your off-Facebook activity
I chanced upon a mention of off-Facebook activity on this page, and here’s a good page explaining what it is. (That first link has a lot of advice on what you can do to improve your privacy if you have Facebook, much of which I’ve mentioned over the years. But it’s very handy to have […]
Read More… from You can remove and turn off your off-Facebook activity
Facebook allows ad preference editing again
I was surprised to find that I could access my Facebook advertising preferences again, after the section stopped working in January 2019. What was there was still way off, in June 2021, but it’s nice to be able to edit (read delete) them again after two-and-a-half years. Things move slowly in Menlo Park when it […]
Dear Gmail user: your industry has worn me down
After three messages I decided I would answer one of those Gmail users asking about advertorial. And from now on I’m just going to copy and paste this to anyone else asking, ‘Why won’t you answer me?’ Dear [redacted]: Sorry, this is why I haven’t answered you (and this is not because of you, but […]
Read More… from Dear Gmail user: your industry has worn me down
On OneDrive, Flickr, and FLOC
Yesterday, I worked remotely, and I don’t know what possessed me, but as OneDrive was activated on my laptop, I decided to save a word processing file there, planning to grab it from my desktop machine later in the day. Normally I would just leave the file where it was and transfer it across the […]
How to get your Facebook ad account shut down: do something honest
‘We can’t level, you crazy bastard, we’re in advertising!’—Paul Reiser as Stephen Bachman, in Crazy People (1990) Signal You can run ads with misinformation, and you can launch bot nets of thousands of accounts, but what can’t you do on Facebook? Buy ads that expose their tools with which you have bought their […]
Read More… from How to get your Facebook ad account shut down: do something honest
It’s not hard writing clear terms and conditions
We’ve had a ‘Highlights’ section in our T&Cs for a while, but today I thought I’d take another look at them. Without reading them again, I drafted these: • We don’t know anything about you unless you tell us. • When you do tell us stuff (like signing up with your email address) we store […]
Read More… from It’s not hard writing clear terms and conditions