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Comment by justsaysmthng | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, I've been away for a couple of hours... What happened ?

Why should I (we) block all facebook domains ?

This is probably a reaction to the news that Facebook is now officially tracking non-users to create shadow profiles and serve adverts to them off Facebook itself. I think it's the serve-adverts-off-Facebook-itself part that's the actual news; all of the moderately chilling tracking and profile construction was of course happening already.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11795248/facebook-ad-netwo...

And yet, Google started going down a similar path since December 2009 when they introduced personalized searches for non-logged-in users and nobody tries to block them.

The problem with blocking all google doains is the amount of sites it would break. Youtube, gmail, googleapis for js libraries, google's blog platform, maps based on google maps and more would break.

Pretty terrible. We should be able to block Google tracking, too.

Technically true, but blocking all Facebook domains breaks comments on many sites and the login feature on a few crucial ones too.

<sarcasm>It also 100% breaks your social life, but maybe there's little of that left to disrupt anyway, amongst the typical target audience for these lists :P</sarcasm>

It's actually the other way around. Normal people have managed their social lives without facebook for generations. It's only the recent crop or two who seem unable to do it.

No, "Normal people" who care about their social lives use whatever their friends use to get together at the time. Nowadays this is social networking sites, i.e. Facebook.

> nobody tries to block them

This is factually incorrect. Just because you haven't personally seen people block Google domains doesn't mean those people don't exist. I've blocked many Google domains for a long time. Not only was GA the first domain in my blacklist, it's also the domain that many of my non-technical friends/family wanted blocked.

I can think of a long line of excellent reasons for that...

This may well have come up because of recent news that Facebook is stepping up it's targeting of people on the open web. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11790976

You should do nothing. I can think of at least one good reason why I want to do that though: to disable their tracking of non-users on this my computer.

Procrastination perhaps?

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