Backblaze and Facebook Pixel Tracking
vyas
OGRetired
Received this message from Backblaze.
Apologising for incorrectly sending tracking ads in my Facebook feed. I do not recall signing in (i use 2fa and the log did not show me using backblaze in March) but..
Moral of the story: if you see “fbclkid” or similar in the url, delete the tracking link,or do not sign in.
We are writing to inform you of a recent event that may have involved your account. On March 8, 2021, a new Backblaze marketing campaign was incorrectly configured to potentially trigger an advertising pixel on a signed-in page “b2_browse_files2.htm.” The issue was discovered on March 21, 2021 and promptly fixed the same day.
You are receiving this correspondence because, based on our investigation, we believe that you may have accessed that page during this time frame. If you accessed that page and you took the additional steps of browsing your files AND clicking on a file to preview file information, certain metadata consisting of the file name, file size, and upload timestamp may have been shared with Facebook. No customer files, nor the content of any customer files, were shared. Facebook is obligated to only process information based on our instructions and we have instructed them to not further process this data and to delete it. We therefore have no reason to believe this event had any impact on your account, but we nevertheless wanted to provide you with this update and apologize for this mistake.
If you would like more information, please see the following link: Privacy Update: Third-party Tracking (backblaze.com).
Comments
Thus proving social networking is a misnomer. Facebook -> ASBO!
It wisnae me! A big boy done it and ran away.
NVMe2G for life! until death (the end is nigh)
So they hardcoded a fbclkid into their own website?
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Ha ha . Practically a self goal by BB
They told facebook that FB can access a lot more user information than just tracking who visited Backblaze.
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Recently I was helping a friend with a few new web pages. These development versions were on secret URLs, something like /var/www/friendswebsite.com/html/development/secret123.html . Although friendswebsite.com was being served, there were no links to these files. We were editing with ssh and vi.
When a beautiful young lady, a family member, wanted to see the files, we said, "Sure!" She accessed the files from her phone's web browser over the course of a few days.
In the server logs we could see that every page she accessed was followed, shortly afterward, by another access from what seemed to be a bot using the name of a large social media website.
Assuredly there was no social media stuff on the web page drafts or anywhere on friendswebsite. Conceivably, however, the big social media company received via the young lady's phone "certain metadata," not the entire content at the time she was reading it, but enough to go grab that entire content a moment later. I guess BB would be a little different from the situation with the young lady in that what looked like a big social media company's bot couldn't grab the entire content of files stored at BB.
It's not that there was any big secret to the pages under development. Just that they weren't intended to go live until finished. Meanwhile, however, it did feel weird to see every visit by the young family member followed (stalked?) by the bot.
Maybe web development should take place at BB behind closed doors, encrypted, and compressed, 😃
Of course, we were watching the logs. How different is that?
MetalVPS
Valid points sir,
And concerning. Probably she did not log out of the big SM site.
But... what if the bot was following the young lady?
Evolution of artificial intelligence after all,
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^ ..more likely some tracking crap added to the device, after doing the "serious" SM stuff.
There was a time when it was indoctrinated to keep business and pleasure on separate devices.
Perhaps even the ISP - I know Talktalk (an AOHell company ) tracks where you go, for example - I've witnessed it first hand.
It wisnae me! A big boy done it and ran away.
NVMe2G for life! until death (the end is nigh)