Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?
user-images.githubusercontent.com
user-images.githubusercontent.com
Pretty sure they were breaking all kinds of PII laws.
Imagine gloating and being proud of such a career.
In a completely different matter, I worked on high level space programs in the late 1970s and if you had any idea about the information that the government is hiding on extraterrestrial life TO THIS DAY, your hair would stand.
It was a straightforward call to get info about the user, including name, email, interests, etc. Their friends list. Info about all their friends, including all the same details. And so on.
There was a EULA where the developer had to promise to delete all the info when the user signed out of the game, and not to share the info. That was the only security.
The project fizzled, but when the Cambridge Analytica news broke, it confused me, because my recollection is EVERYBODY had all those lists of user info. Seriously, tens of thousands of different companies, with the only thing stopping them was a pinky promise.
From memory this has now all been rolled up into cohort demographics and 'look-a-like' audiences so you can no longer break your data down by specific users demographic attributes or target ads by say an email list unless they are already your users (and it's used for specific types of ads; retargeting).
From memory some of the more unsettling breakdown/targets were
- Ethnicity
- Life events
- Politics
- Pages (so other businesses) they had liked
Now they just use the facebook pixel to put you into look a like audiences because they can see you went to the home insurance website and the real estate website (they all have the pixel installed) and make the same broad assumptions we were previously making but on the cohort and not your specific unique identifier.
Why shouldn't I be able to advertise to people who have recently marked themselves as married, or who liked the Yankees facebook page?
You also shouldn't be able to upload a list of email addresses, target your ads to them, and then use Facebook's analytics to see how many of those people have divorces or an investment property via the segmentation analysis. Depending on how small that list is, a lot of that data starts getting very specific to an individual.
Facebook obviously also thought you shouldn't be able to do this since now you can't. Everything is now cohort and look-alikes.
Additionally your acting like Facebook is only putting you in the ‘recently married’ bucket if you marked yourself as married. Facebook is smarter than that, they are putting you in these buckets based on your messages, instagram activity, and browsing behaviour, not necessarily based on public information you expose in your profile.
The above, is all frowned up (for the record, I 100% agree) what is interesting is, our civilization has evolved to frown up the above "categorizing" of people, but from that list (only ethnicity) is not "choose able" by the person.
I.e I can mostly choose when I get married and to whom and which party I support but I def cannot choose my race. Yet the above is all considered 'equally bad'.
Just something I noticed.
'offline conversion' still allows you to send in names, age, bday, gender, etc for matching, IP, UA.
Though now it's hashed before going to FB.
And you can pass almost whatever custom data you want in. So I can in my industry optimize for a long term political donor, or potentially an early vote. Or someone accidentally sends in 'this person bought hepatitis meds'
This still exists despite what someone below said, unless I'm totally missing or misunderstanding something.
However it is not as valuable, and shrinking audience able to do deliver to because of iOS restrictions. And likely with Chrome too eventually
FB used to have more detailed interest/demographic buckets to target that they supplied. Used to be able to type in basically anything from what someone likes ___ very niche page to engages liberal political. There are still interests but there are fewer of those 'sensitive' ones. Still lots of stuff like works at ___. of course age, gender, geo.
But more fine grained interest targeting seems like going away pretty soon it's just going to be broad demographics.
The ROI is just not as good without iOS fine grained targeting FB is having to do a bunch of tricks with AI/modeling to try and make it perform but it's not as good.
I'm for targeted advertising. I think what iOS is doing is uncompetitive and bad.
But I do think there should be some sensible regulation. Like no healthcare or sensitive topic data (LGBTQ, dating, etc).
** ADDITION sorry this is long but one additional thing I think people also confusing the ad product with the old FB api.
The old FB api was an absolute sieve you could get basically any data a person has on their profile and also their friend's data. This is what happened with Cambridge Analytics.
All that has been shut down even login with fb they are way more strict about actually testing sites etc
It is however an easily-reversible hash, by design as that's how FB can correlate between the different datasets. When it comes to finite sets such as phone numbers or dates of birth it's also trivial to search the entire space by bruteforce.
For sure on a rainbow table for something like cell phone. but i don't know why that would matter? Anyone can generate all the possible phone numbers.
The whole point is that it is matchable. Like if they already have my email then they know if it's a match, but if they don't have my email they don't know what the missing email is.
Like what's my email from this (without knowing my email) below: 2c03e4a168bed89f5208250cdefbe97d4d87ba7812df896311676acc2ddfcdb4
Names and emails can be bruteforced with various lists from existing data breaches or data brokers and you'll probably reverse 80% of them.
However reversing them is not even necessary - an adversary like Facebook can infer it based on other data, for example, let's say they know your phone number but not your email - now you buy/sign up to vendors providing both that phone number and email and they provide it to Facebook - now Facebook knows that you signed up to those vendors with your number (as they have the plain text value, can hash it on their side and compare), but they also see that there's a mysterious email hash - they don't know its plaintext value, but it perfectly matches the same vendors that have your phone number. They can infer that it's probably your email address, and while they still don't know what it is, they can use the hashed value to track you across other vendors without ever having to know the plaintext value.
I really don’t understand the goal with vague statements like this that can’t even provide even the slightest hint of specifics.
What specific data? Even a single example would make this anecdote useful. Instead it feels more like a brag. “I know something but I’m not telling” but in this case the commenter doesn’t claim to have worked at Facebook (just the industry in general) so I suspect it’s hearsay anyway.
> Pretty sure they were breaking all kinds of PII laws.
Given the way Facebook has been under the microscope and dragged in front of Congress, I’m going to assume that their corporate counsel was very careful to provide at least a best-effort attempt to comply with every law available at the time. It may not be popular, but I really doubt Facebook was violating laws for a decade straight as the largest player in the space.
You can quickly create an account and look at their self-serve ads. There's no reason why anyone needs to try and "guess" what these tracking tools can do. You can just go to the endpoint of that collected data and just see what you can target.
It's better now but before you could do EVEN more. But better in the sense that someone who needs a limb amputating to stop gangrene setting in is better.
The ubiquity of user tracking is extremely useful yet culturally absurd. Now that’s ambiguous ;)
It’s changed a bit recently with GDPR, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and some third party cookie privacy stuff so it’s a bit less insidious now, but it’s still pretty bad.
Frankly I do not know why corporations don't block facebook as a security risk. Seriously that stuff is bleeding info on what your employees are up to.
Key points: https://twitter.com/YBenkler/status/1070337233159372806?s=20...
Here was one thread of highlights which is still somewhat readable: https://web.archive.org/web/20181206132832/https://twitter.c...
Germany banned their cross-site data sharing/reciprocity, such as from menstrual cycle-tracking apps which had come to light (maybe separately), in 2019: https://twitter.com/YBenkler/status/1093495901342126080?s=20...
The difference when it comes to other industries (e.g. food) is that the regulation has had time to develop, and most legislators understand the concepts. So it's harder to cheat.
Forgetting someones opt-out preferences by mistake doesn't ring as severe as using light carcinogens in your food mix.
And no doubt it's not compatible with their current business model. Which is the point, it's a model that exploits property that isn't theirs for unfair gain.
I doubt it's on FB during that period though?
I would guess though that a bunch of health tech sent (perhaps accidentally just not understanding) a bunch of patient data though. Seems they are the responsible party.
There's been other examples beyond FB of 'auto track' too. devs just don't know or forget to turn it off.
Not to mention for some reason at that time putting a FB like button on all the porn. Who clicks that?!?!
I worked for a "healthtech" company in London at the beginning of the pandemic. They had the Facebook SDK malware embedded in the app that people were supposed to use for GP consultations.
I don't believe any explicit health data was sent (there was no intent to do so, and I’m not sure if that would even be possible), but merely the fact that I'm talking to a doctor (and the current time, location, device fingerprint, etc) is not something I'd like Facebook to know.
I know breaching the GDPR is basically the norm in any tech company but I thought that being involved in healthcare would make them super risk-averse and make an extra effort to comply.
They were not alone in this - PatientAccess and a bunch of other sites - that you can use to book GP consultations (including through the NHS - UK’s socialised healthcare system) had a shit ton of such trackers too, obviously loaded before any GDPR consent could even be obtained.
I'm pretty sure everyone of technical aptitude knew Facebook's data faucet. But maybe I missed something.
As far as I know, Facebook:
a) Had all the freely provided data, PII/likes/social graph/etc.
b) On Facebook's site or mobile app, the were fingerprinting your device, examining your scrolling/mouse/clicking/other inputs to determine attention on a page
c) Could recreate most nonuser's social graphs just by seeing them as endpoints in registered people's contacts c) On the web, had "like" buttons or ads and their code pretty much everywhere. Therefore they could track most people to most sites.
d.1) Sites could directly provide more information to allow retargeting d.2) Sites could directly provide more information through a host of other services FB offered to the developers
e) On mobile, in the background, scrapped your contacts, GPS, nearby devices (other phones, WiFi, Bluetooth, although tower information may or not be included). Also, had installed by default on a lot of phones
f) On mobile, provided libraries people could import into their apps, mostly but not exclusively for ads. This let them get similar insights into usage patterns as on the web. Also, if people didn't install the FB app, let them get (e)
g) Used your real identity to purchase information about you from the various realworld data merchants
Which did I miss?
I don't think you missed anything substantial... but I'll add two extensions:
(1) Social graphs change slowly. And they still own Instagram, so for many users they have a live social graph still.
(2) Facebook Pixel is dead. Long live Facebook Pixel!
The Facebook Pixel is now (or at least nearing) effectively dead on modern up-to-date devices running ad blockers. Of course that leaves plenty of desktop machines where people aren't running ad blockers.
But more importantly, Facebook has acknowledged the elephant in the room and moved from client side to server side with Conversions API (CAPI) (aka the new "Facebook Pixel"). And there's nothing ad blockers can do about server-side analytics...
In its simplest form the pixel is used to attribute an ad view/click to a conversion event. At the beginning of the online ad industry that’s all it did, advertisers for the first time had the ability to directly, in real time, see the effectiveness of their ads. The economic value and GDP generated due to this innovation is immeasurable, the internet economy is literally built on it.
At the beginning there was no profile building, combining with PII and data gathered from social media or even your gmail emails (yes the content of your emails). And it was magical!
It’s the innovations since that have moved the entire industry through a grey area into the blank where the way they operate is questionable at best.
The point is, this tracking pixel on its own is incredible what it unlocks. It’s the way that data is then used that we have to call into question.
Personally the simplest form of attribution to me is fine. It works and I don’t believe it’s invasive if they aren’t then combining it with pii and profile data. Sadly that time has passed and all advertising networks now rely so heavily of ML/AI that it’s impossible to manage them, as an advertiser, in the way you used to. Hopefully regulation will push the industry back to where it was.
Nice illustration of how "innovation" != "progress"
> How does including interest-based tracking for a product make a commitment to privacy from unrelated companies' tracking "smoke and mirrors"? There's a difference between the privacy I expect from a direct service provider and from various random agents seeking to build a profile on me.
On the other hand, you always have a choice to not use UberEats(or most others) and order by phone/walk-in and save your resources.
And it would be a bit of exaggeration to say targeting doesn’t work - It’s obviously far from perfect but it generates billions everyday for a reason.
I don't want to be targetted.
> So it’s just good karma to let them run ...
No. It's my machine, not theirs, they don't get to use it to track me. Not one single cycle. It certainly isn't "good karma" to allow advertisers free reign like that, it's letting the fox loose in the hen-house.
>> Don't open their website
Sure, or just don't allow them to load these things.
Honestly I'm moving in the direction of not visiting. Instead of a useless do-not-track header, I'd much rather send a "will-not-render" header. I'd be quite happy to tell your server that under no circumstances will my browser be participating in tracking or even rendering your ads. If you'd rather not serve me the page at that point then cool, lets go our separate ways.
I imagine a company like uber eats, who I am actually trying to pay when I visit their site, might still like to serve me the page. Ad-supported content less so.
Is this based on your knowledge or experience in the ad industry? Or just your intuition on how it should work? What I see in OP is UberEats loading a tracking pixel directly from TikTok servers, where the “pixel” is actually a full events.js analytics script that could send user data straight to TikTok.
Really? I thought Apple's newly-implemented ATT was exactly what made attribution impossible for things like app store purchases.
This is the specific thing I'm referring to.
Rotten to the core.
It collected only pages visited, browser versions and referer (sic) headers - it didn't occur to me to collect anything else - and yet provided vast amounts of business value to our customers as well as a vast amounts of experience at scaling for me (though, uh, given how badly the early versions of that code scaled, not necessarily at the same time).
> The point is, this tracking pixel on its own is incredible what it unlocks. It’s the way that data is then used that we have to call into question.
I entirely agree with this statement, and what's happened since saddens me.
I'm going to pour another drink and take a moment to feel old now.
(edited to add: 'tracking pixel' seems to mean that class of instrument to many other commenters, I'm specifically talking about an <img> tag that loaded a single pixel transparent gif ... I also made bar charts for the analytics users' UI using HTML tables with a pair of <td> tags per row, one with a coloured background, one clear, using percentages to provide relative data. 2001 was a different world)
How is this not everyone's first thought?
Uber Eats' own analytics
sc-static.net (Snapchat? whois doesn't reveal anything.)
Google Tag Manager
Facebook Connect
Yahoo
TikTok
ispot.tv (Some sort of ad management solution.)
Hotjar (Behavioural analytics.)
BingI work on helping new Shopify merchants get more early sales, and ads are super important for that to happen. Open up any small and growing e-commerce store and you'll see at least this many.
Without ads, you don't find these small businesses, and all consumers just go to Amazon, or other large established marketplaces.
The hard part (as far as I can tell) is product market fit and finding your customer base. Once that's established, you have some momentum, leading to repeat customers and lower acquisition costs. IE: once an ad network has some existing customers to build a model on, it's cheaper to target ads on similar customers.
But that initial part is very hard. New privacy rules, like Apple's changes, are a good thing generally, but they make it more expensive for small businesses to acquire initial customers because ads are less effective, so you have to pay for more of them to find your customers. That gives Amazon (and other established competition) a massive advantage. They know everyone deeply and can target everywhere very precisely.
I've heard that the Shopify subreddits are well liked by merchants. Good info there.
There's also the Gurus that can provide some support for free, as well as you can hire an 'Expert' through Shopify to get even more help.
All this is to say the most groan-inducing phrase in business: you've got to spend more to make more. And there's no guarantee that you'll earn it back because business is hard.
So I install uBlock, uMatrix and Pi-hole everywhere. Also help customers do the same with sane defaults so they get rid of most stuff without burning their whole browser.
And as an advertiser we don't have to pay for the people that didn't want to see our ads in the first place, win win loose :-)
https://www.adexchanger.com/investment/google-reveals-youtub...
The ad industry as a whole is absolutely untrustworthy. Even you pay you can't trust not to be tracked.
The same thing can, and is happening server side. Every platform out there now has an event/conversion API [1]. If you are logging in to Uber Eats with a email/phone number you have used elsewhere then you are going to be tracked full-stop.
1. Here is TikTok's for example https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article?aid=10003669
Neither of these companies will create a shell profile if you never visit them.
If they are criminal why would you use them?
People don’t give money to scammers because they know their scammers.
It’s the same with privacy issues, people who don’t know what’s happening can’t make informed choices.
it's really distasteful how privacy advocates always assume that everybody who doesn't feel the same way they do is uninformed. the average person has a basic understanding that companies keep track of them online. everybody who's spent more than five minutes online without an adblocker understands retargeting.
it's not that people don't understand, it's that they don't care. telling people they're not informed enough to make their own decisions isn't going to convince them to start caring about the issue you care about.
"Facebook listening to people" wouldn't be noteworthy if people weren't creeped out by it.
These consent banners are a false sense of privacy. People who “dont know” are most likely just going to give consent anyway. It’s the same thing as TOS consent.
Then you would only see those popups if either your browser or the website didn't support or wasn't sending those headers for whatever reason.
We have and had a standardized way of indicating consent. They just decided to ignore it.
They are also a set of dark patterns. They annoy you so you just click OK, they make it sound like if you want to opt out you're the unreasonable one, and they hide the options as best they can. Sometimes they hide them entirely.
If they weren't intent on tracking and reselling that data, they wouldn't need to ask. They don't need to have these dialogues, that is their choice.
Which aren't compliant with the GDPR, the regulation they're pretending to comply with. The problem is enforcement has been severely lacking and the regulators are useless at handling complaints even when you do waste hours submitting one.
Surely then, the average person is much more informed!
most people i've discussed the topic with misunderstand how much they're being tracked, but assume that they are being tracked more than they actually are, not less. and they're totally okay with that.
> and they're totally okay with that
No. In my experience they are very much not ok with it at all but have absolutely no idea what to do about it. I know what I'm doing with computers and I have difficulty figuring out all the different ways info can leak and how to plug those holes. In many cases you can't plug those holes without opting out of various services entirely. We badly need regulation preventing this stuff because in practice you can't vote with your feet or your wallet.
Even people like my parents - who have been using computers in some capacity since the late 90s but don’t work in anything related to computing - had no idea that Verizon was selling their browsing data despite being account holders who ‘agreed’ to the T&C and received e-mails warning them that it was going to start doing so.
The problem with pervasive user tracking and surveillance capitalism is that is impossible to be informed. No user has any idea what happens to their data once it gets collected by a 3rd party, and there is zero way for them to know who has it now, how accurate that data is, or how it will be leveraged against them.
Increasingly the data being taken from us in secret is used in far reaching ways. It's not just about what ad gets pushed at us, but it's how much we pay for things, how long you wait on hold, what a company will tell you their policies are, what jobs you are offered, etc.
While you might find it distasteful, I can tell you that you yourself don't understand what data has been collected about you, who has it now, or what impacts it will have on your life and your future. You can't make an informed choice about what services to use because you aren't even allowed to know what the costs are, or will be. Jjust like how nobody who uses ubereats had any idea that data was being secretly collected by tiktoc or what it will be used for.
Citation? I bet TikTok will create shadow profiles for anyone who browses the web (and sure, somewhere in the 89 zillion line small print for whatever tools they offer to small time webmasters will be a carefully phrased line about how it might occasionally send small amounts of visitor information to them) just like Google does.
False. It's a pixel. It's not visible to the user from whom its existence and purpose is being deliberately concealed.
Literally criminalised? As in you’ll throw people in jail for putting up a pixel? Made illegal, sure.
If they're acting so antagonistically against GDPR maybe , for some of the most egregious cases, throwing some people in jail will do the trick
I mean, whoever does the whole song and dance for rejecting cookies that shows a loading gif and takes a while does deserve it
And if you think I'm exaggerating, guess who has the best info now on the Ukraine war? Tiktok.
This is how you get a legal code like America's, where a cop and prosecutor can put almost anyone in jail with the flimsiest excuse.
I understand the impulse. But the solution to bad enforcement isn't ratcheting up penalties. It's increasing enforcement.
Usually what I find is that the American companies/people usually try to follow the "bare" letter of the law, where Europeans need to follow the spirit, as this is how it is "usually" enforced.
And while the former might let you get away with "one weird trick" the latter usually leaves more margin to interpretation which can be both a blessing and a curse.
Then how come America, with its strict procedural safeguards, has that legal environment where people now feel unsafe even talking to cops, whereas many European countries with a more common-sense, less rules-lawyery approach (like the big fines handed out to a lot of privacy-violating tech companies lately) have a much friendlier culture with fewer obvious abuses?
Then again we as an industry and/or community don't seem to be doing too well either.
Not a trivial problem or policy space, sadly.
You want to be able to see that you are actually getting a positive return from the money you are spending on ads.
TikTok, Facebook, Google, etc following me around provides me no value on the other hand - in fact, I have no account with any and would not see their ads even if I wanted to, so it's technically in their best interest to not waste processing power on stalking me.
What's super idiotic in all this is that the "data companies bad" is often spread by the very companies which would rather have data themselves than their competitors.
Interestingly, it only loads after you agree to third party cookies by clicking “Got it”. So I guess they at least respect that.
I don't really have any information worth hiding. Even the worst case catostrophic leak scenarios are really not a big deal for me. So I just decided to stop making my life harder; I got a smartphone, I turned on the convenience services that track me, I started looking at pictures in my emails. I still think privacy is important, but I stopped caring about mine.
By the way, in this specific case another answer is "UberEats? Learn To Cook™!"
DNT status is not readable by JS (by design), so DNT cannot be implemented in the client. So all tracking calls are still made over the network. It is then up to the server processing those calls to drop them if the DNT header is present. Thus, there is no way for a user to verify that DNT is actually honored.
Hotjar is probably the only one (claiming to be) honoring DNT consistently. Luckily Hotjar is a SaaS where the customer cannot influence this decision. But for all other tracking solutions, whenever marketeers are given the option, they will always choose to ignore DNT.
This is not a defense of DNT by the way - it has other problems such as the increased fingerprinting surface, etc.
But the JS is served by a server, which can read the DNT header, so why can't it just write different JS based on the content of the header? It can be as simple as writing "let do_not_track = true;" if the header is present.
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/d...
Might be an answer.
"Everyone else was doing it, so therefore we in particular are not guilty of any wrongdoing." Perhaps some folks think that is a good defense.
no in this case i think this post has everything to do with OP believing that this pixel tracking by a non-American/non-Western firm (in this case Chinese) is somehow less kosher compared to tracking by Silicon Valley social media platforms/firms (who, as others have pointed out, use exactly the same tools/strategies).
I missed the part where this is shocking.
Dump TikTok and save the world.
Unless of course they list the (likely hundreds of) companies they're sharing data with in a dreaded GDPR "cookie banner".