How does Facebook know?

Facebook, I believe, reads your browser’s history. Whether the pages you visit share info or not that info is stored on your computer and sites like Facebook and Google can see it.

Facebook doesn’t, in all probability. But hundreds of other sneaky websites put “trackers” or “web beacons” (see those defined in wikipedia) on your machine. And if one of the web beacons matches when you go to a new website (like Facebook), then the other ad site is delivering these creepy ads.

So technically, Facebook is telling the truth – they’re not sharing anything themselves. But they are selling advertising to people who use these web beacons to track you.

I strongly suggest that you download and use the FREE utility called “Ghostery” that snuffs out these web beacons. https://www.ghostery.com/en/home

I second @elbanditoroso ‘s suggestion of Ghostery. I just went to Duckduckgo and did not see any trackers. Then I clicked the first link it returned and 12 trackers attempted to load. All were stopped by Ghostery. They were:
ChartBeat
Criteo
DoubleClick
DoubleClick Floodlight
eXelate
ForeSee
Google AdWords Conversion
Google Analytics
Google+ Platform
Krux Digital
Media Optimizer (Adobe)
Twitter Button

Thanks Guys! I will see if I can stop this.

Just added it. Thanks! I’ve had the same experience.

So now I downloaded it and I have a little crazy-making box that pops up and tells me what is tracking my sites. Does it stop the tracking from happening automatically or do I have to do something? (I feel like flo.)

@janbb – click on the blue man at the top of the screen. move the slider from blue (open to tracking) to red (no tracking). The only one that allow to be blue is Google Analytics. I turn all the others off.

@elbanditoroso Thanks! Got it!

Does the purple box that pops up have lines through the names?

If it doesn’t there should be a little icon with a window like this

Once you get there click the gear icon and select options. In the General Tab disable ghostrank.

Then go down until you find where it looks like this.

Make sure you disable all Trackers and Cookies.

Yup – thanks.

Might blocking all that tracking speed up my browser, yes?
But then again, having Ghostery would mean yet another process running in the background, so maybe there will be no net difference?

@2davidc8 – Ghostery only runs when the browser is open – not all the time. Not a huge tradeoff.

Browser won’t be that much faster. The beacon or tracker is still downloaded before it is blocked. I suppose there is a small incremental savings in not sending the return back to the server. But probably not enough to measure.

Is Ghostery available for mobile or tablets? If not is there something of similar function that will work on tablets?

Ok, so I tried this and it seems to be working but it brought up another question: Why is Google Analytics ALWAYS one of the items that comes up? Is Google that pervasive? It even shows up on Fluther.

I would say try Tor onion browser, it hides your IP address by sending the info through many different computers and assembling it back together at the destination. Since no one computer is used to transport the info, there is no IP address to track.

@elbanditoroso Thanks. I’ll try it!