Hello, smart people. Filling out an online form to volunteer for something, Firefox’s Facebook-fence icon appeared on the email field. Confused, I clicked on its question mark. On the next page, Mozilla wanted to sell me Firefox relay for $7/mo. (That’s their VPN + email masking + phone masking.) I used my yandex.ru email address instead for $0. Here’s the question: is Facebook really able to track me because I’ve signed up to volunteer for Cornel West (setting aside the FB-Russia blockage issue)? Thanks.

  • Synthead@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    is Facebook really able to track me

    Oh yes. The “like” buttons on websites are also used for tracking people, so any website that is Facebook-enabled will know who you are. Additionally, browser fingerprinting makes it difficult to stay anonymous, even without an account.

    More or less, it’s the worst-case scenario. Governments of many countries have sued and fined the crap out of them for obtaining data in a way that is illegal. But they make so much money with that data that they almost ignore the concern.

  • Otter@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I don’t think you need relay/VPN to block the facebook stuff if you have the container turned on? I haven’t gotten a popup like that from Firefox before

    • zerofk@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Indeed, this sounds like a scummy way to sell vpn. While it is true that Facebook embeds tracking in other sites, these can be easily blocked without vpn.

      • Moghul@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I mean… OP interacted with a privacy feature. The tracking was already blocked, but if you go further, you might be interested in privacy in other ways. It’s not an entirely unreasonable place to assume a user might be interested in your other privacy products.

        That being said, I don’t know that I would put all my privacy eggs in one basket with one company. I use a variety of products, free and paid.

      • FredericChopin_@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        Passive aggressive response aside.

        Your wording is rather poor and doesn’t read like you signed up for yandex instead and reads like using this email address reduced the Mozilla charge from 7 -> 0.

        Perhaps, you shouldn’t make assumptions and you could have asked for clarification on what I was referring too.

        Have a wonderful day!!

        • riley0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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          1 year ago

          Perhaps, you shouldn’t make assumptions

          I didn’t sign up for Yandex instead. I’ve had a Yandex account for a long time. Also, your comments aren’t clear, but I don’t care. 'Bye.

          • lud@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Firefox relay is about hiding your existing email from advertising and spam. It’s not an email provider like Yandex, Google, or Microsoft

            • riley0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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              1 year ago

              I knew that, but thanks. FF’s advertisement hit me out of left field and offered things I already have. I’ve got Proton’s new PW manager, which offers email aliases, but I’m used to doing it the old way.

  • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    Facebook is able to track you quite successfully almost everywhere unless you block them using an anti-Facebook blocklist with a decent ad-blocker such as ublock origin. At the very least, everywhere you see a “share on Facebook” or a “like” button, you’re being tracked by Facebook

    Mozilla, sadly, isn’t really that trustworthy anymore. A VPN is not really helpful when it comes to ensuring privacy - a VPN hides your IP address from sites you connect to, but cookies, browser fingerprint, login accounts, etc. are much more useful than your IP address because your IP address is likely shared with other users, potentially many others. And additionally, you’re trusting the VPN provider with far, far more than you really should. It would be pretty straight forward for some VPN provider to steal your login details for basically any website if they wanted to do so.

    For emails, disposable email address providers exist and if you use Bitwarden password manager (highly recommended!) then you can use them to generate username/password combinations for any website you like.

  • riley0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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    1 year ago

    Thanks, everyone, for the info and education. I’ve just discovered and added Privacy Badger to FF. Tracking makes me feel slimed.

    • PlexSheep@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Iirc privacy badger had some incident where they became untrustworthy, ublock Origin is the highly recommended tool against everything.

      Don’t take this for granted, do your own research, unlike me.