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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

If anyone in your household uses FB from the IOS or android mobile app from wifi, it will have both your IP address and GPS coordinates. Correlating that multiple people share one residence or workplace is easily done for FB. You can keep playing a shell game like run all your desktop PC traffic through a VPN somewhere so that the FB container doesn't show up as the same geolocation, but you or an ignorant non technical user you live or work with will slip up.

Edit: fb also buys geolocation data from organizations that do the modern equivalent of wardriving. Correlating GPS location with RSSI of specific wifi SSIDs and AP MAC addresses. If anyone near you uses the app, even if their phone has all location services turned off, you're still geoprofiled to within a city block.

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What's your point? Facebook still won't know what websites you visit on your PC. It also doesn't have geolocation access there unless you explicitly grant it.

That the targeted advertising and profiling will still come to you. Live with a person who joins fb mommy groups and buys diapers online? Prepare for a barrage of relevant ads. The main point is that the combination of relationship-inference and geolocation can undo probably 70% of your own privacy protection measures, through ignorant ordinary use of the fb app by friends, family and coworkers. Then combine that with fb facial recognition profiling from photos third parties may upload...

Sure, they will still track you as best as they can (though as I said Facebook doesn't have geolocation access on desktop). This doesn't change the fact that without your browsing profile, Facebook will have less knowledge about you than it would normally have, period. Facebook can't "undo" that.

I think that was the OP’s point. FB woule have geolocation information on you because thanks to someone else’s use of your WiFi network on their cellphone, FB can now associate your IP address with a geographical location.

So even though you’re on desktop and haven’t provided them with location permissions, they can still identify your location based on your IP address.

Ah, okay. I still don't see how this would undo preventing Facebook from knowing what websites you visit. The location of your PC seems like an entirely separate data point.

Facebook can use GeoIP on their servers to position you within a few miles. That's close enough for demographic profiling. And like others mentioned, if anyone uses the Facebook app on your home network, Facebook can link the devices precise position with your IP address.

Putting in my year of birth to 1911 (but the same month/day so half friends don't send me wishes on the wrong day) used to mostly destroy their targeted advertising. It was all adverts for arthritis medication. They're steadily figuring it out, but it's taken them about 10 years.

I'm also enjoying completely meaningless ads as I lie to them about my gender.

Perhaps we need a specific Tor shell Facebook app. Then it's just a wrapper onto the desktop site.

Just force your kids to use that on mobile and use Tor on desktop with Facebook as the homepage.

You can tell your kids that 'Tor' means 'Facebook' in Icelandic.

lots of people have a dynamic ip. if you don't want that fb (or any other web-thing) correlates an ip with you, you should get an isp that gives you a dynamic ip.

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