13 Feb
2025
13 Feb
'25
5:19 p.m.
OK. They have a cookie. I'm not at their site, they can't read it. They
can't read other sites cookies either. That's the spec.
I have to go to their site or use an associated site, to pick up the pixel. I didn't
do that.
There is no magic.:)
Regardless of all that tracking, how would they know my query/request?
To me, the only reasonable answer is that Google and Facebook share info behind the
scenes, i.e. directly.
As I understand it, a tracking pixel works because it is on the page you visit. It comes
from, .let's say, Facebook's server, and they know the page that requested it.
And they can get the info in the request header. To know who you are, whoever wrote the
page has to have known who you are and encoded that in the pixlel somehow, maybe through
it's name, or some other attribute.
I haven't really been following a lot of the changes that have been made to store more
information in caches on browsers. I'm wondering if there is something going on
there. I really don't like the fact that browsers have taken this direction.
Perhaps I need to look at those specs and see what is going on.
On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 09:10:47PM -0800, Diego R. Martinez wrote:
Facebook tends to have cookies in your browser and
advertising pixels that
basically track everything you do.
And the thing about it is that, once you're in their system, you will get
tracked for life. So that probably explains that...
On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 8:56 PM <saclug(a)garymcglinn.com> wrote:
> I know that there are a lot of ways to have your online activity tracked.
> And, I thought I understood many or most of them.
>
> But, I tried out Gemini with the request, "write a two page article on
> Stoicism." The results were interesting and pretty good and give me an
> idea of what Gemini can do.
>
> A week, or less later, yesterday, I get an email from Facebook suggesting
> that I join the "Daily Stoicism" group.
>
> WTF. I never use Facebook and basically ignore their reminders on how many
> notifications or messages I have.
>
> AFAIK, there is no legal way Facebook should know what I am doing with
> Google, unless Google is providing them the information on a back channel.
>
> Am I missing something? Everything I know suggest that I would have had
> to visit a Facebook site sometime between my Gemini request and my receipt
> of an email from Facebook. Or possibly have visited a Facebook site before
> my Gemini request and not have directly entered a URL or used a bookmark in
> the interim. AFAIK, those things didn't happen.
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