MysteriumVPN Free VPN

❗️2 Trackers (Google)
❗️10 Authorizations

👉 Exodus Privacy Report: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/52142/

👉 Privacy policy Mysterium Network:
https://mysterium.network/privacy-policy/

⚠️Financed by advertising, places trackers, records the use and surfing behavior of the user on the Internet and then sells these your data.

👉 See screenshot: https://t.me/BlackBox_Security_Datenschutz_DE/3400

👉Verdict: Do not use it.👈

#Privacy #VPN #Tracking #Google #advertising #Tracking

Facebook Custom Audience illegal without explicit user consent, Bavarian Data Protection Authority rules

Online shops and marketers routinely share customer data with Facebook to reach them with targeted advertising. Turns out: in many cases this is illegal. A ground-breaking decision by a German Data Protection Authority recently ruled that matching customers’ email addresses with their Facebook accounts requires their explicit consent.

Cold medicine when you catch the flu, outdoor clothing when you want to go hiking, diapers after you searched for baby care – targeted advertising on Facebook is everywhere. What many users don’t understand is how exactly advertisers target them on Facebook.

Facebook’s Custom Audience tool is one of many ways in which advertisers can find specific audiences on the platform. The tool allows them to get their message to people they already know, such as clients from their online shops or subscribers of their newsletters. It is one of the foundations of Facebook’s billion-dollar advertising business. It is also illegal, the way it is often used today.

Here’s how Custom Audience works: Advertisers upload a list with customer contact information like email addresses or phone numbers. Facebook then matches these with its own data to identify the desired audience. “In none of the cases we investigated, had companies informed their users, subscribers or customers that their contact information will be shared with Facebook”, explains Kristin Benedikt, head of the internet division at the Bavarian Data Protection Authority, in an interview with netzpolitik.org. Her office recently banned advertisers from using the tool and uploading people’s data to Facebook without explicit user consent. The Higher Administrative Court of the federal state of Bavaria upheld the decision in late 2018, after an online shop had appealed it.

Benedikt elaborates:

"We are certain that Facebook obtains additional information about users from matching email addresses, regardless of whether a person is already registered with Facebook. At the very least, custom audience data shows Facebook that a user is also a customer of a particular company or online store. This may seem harmless in many cases, but we have observed insurance companies that have uploaded email addresses, also online shops for very specific products. When an online pharmacy or an online sex shop shares their customer list with Facebook, we cannot rule out that this reveals sensitive data. The same applies when someone visits the online shop of a political party or subscribes one of their newsletters. In all of these instances custom audiences reveal granular insights. Facebook adds this information to existing profiles and continues to use it, without notifying users or giving them a chance to object."

Read more (english):
https://netzpolitik.org/2019/facebook-custom-audience-illegal-without-explicit-user-consent-bavarian-dpa-rules/

📡 @NoGoolag
#DeleteFacebook #CustomAudience #targeted #advertising #illigal #DPA #Germany #Bavaria

Brave: Browser with its own advertising concept

I often hear the question why I don't recommend the Brave Browser and why I don't participate in the Brave Rewards program. First of all, the browser is based on Chrome - that's enough for me to avoid it as much as possible. Browsers based on Chrome are usually closely linked to Google services. As a user who is sensitive to data protection, I am happy to do without it.

I also find the "advertising concept" unconvincing. The integrated advertising blocker initially prevents advertising from being displayed. Brave then fades in its own advertising, which in the opinion of the developers is "less harmful" and does not make the user traceable on the Internet. For advertising, a fee is to be paid to the user as well as to the advertiser in the form of Basic Attention Tokens (BAT).

Currently, the browser can be operated completely free of advertising - i.e. even without advertising that displays Brave. In the future, this model may be adapted. Who decides then against the Ad Replacement, that must deactivate the integrated advertising blocker. Inevitably this means: In Brave, the user is either shown advertising from the respective website or advertising via the "Ad Replacement" concept. Unlike other browsers, the user cannot completely suppress advertising, for example via Adblocker plug-ins such as uBlock Origin. Whether this will be implemented in this way, however, is still speculation.

Final conclusion: Not recommended

Source:

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/brave-browser-mit-eigenem-werbekonzept/

📡 @NoGoolag
#brave #browser #advertising #kuketz

MetaX Worked With Hundreds of People to Visit Global Publishers’ Sites to Reverse Engineer Google’s Cookie_Push GDPR Workaround (aka ‘Push Pages’) & the OpenX Push Page Workaround

MetaX is proud to provide additional important context to the research released today from Brave and featured in the Financial Times, focusing on a GDPR workaround built by Google known as “cookie_push” (aka “Push Pages”). Our intention is not to single any one company out, but rather inform the community on these ongoing data issues.

The data released by Brave and reported in the Financial Times article showed that Google deployed a new data syncing architecture prior to GDPR – the details released by Brave include numerous written explanations of the process, and also a chart showing the cookie data flow that our team helped with. https://www.ft.com/content/e3e1697e-ce57-11e9-99a4-b5ded7a7fe3f

💡 How Google’s RTB and Push Pages allow hundreds of DSPs to tie their tracking profiles about people together (View the full chart)
https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/sequence.pdf

https://metax.io/metax-report-google-workaround-openx-workaround/

#Google #Brave #DeleteGoogle #tracking #rtb #dsp #GDPR #advertisers #advertising #pdf #why
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Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information

Last week, I ran an ad on Facebook that was targeted at a computer science professor named Alan Mislove. Mislove studies how privacy works on social networks and had a theory that Facebook is letting advertisers reach users with contact information collected in surprising ways. I was helping him test the theory by targeting him in a way Facebook had previously told me wouldn’t work. I directed the ad to display to a Facebook account connected to the landline number for Alan Mislove’s office, a number Mislove has never provided to Facebook. He saw the ad within hours.

One of the many ways that ads get in front of your eyeballs on Facebook and Instagram is that the social networking giant lets an advertiser upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses it has on file; it will then put an ad in front of accounts associated with that contact information. A clothing retailer can put an ad for a dress in the Instagram feeds of women who have purchased from them before, a politician can place Facebook ads in front of anyone on his mailing list, or a casino can offer deals to the email addresses of people suspected of having a gambling addiction. Facebook calls this a “custom audience.”

You might assume that you could go to your Facebook profile and look at your “contact and basic info” page to see what email addresses and phone numbers are associated with your account, and thus what advertisers can use to target you. But as is so often the case with this highly efficient data-miner posing as a way to keep in contact with your friends, it’s going about it in a less transparent and more invasive way.

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.” I managed to place an ad in front of Alan Mislove by targeting his shadow profile. This means that the junk email address that you hand over for discounts or for shady online shopping is likely associated with your account and being used to target you with ads.

Facebook is not upfront about this practice. In fact, when I asked its PR team last year whether it was using shadow contact information for ads, they denied it. Luckily for those of us obsessed with the uncannily accurate nature of ads on Facebook platforms, a group of academic researchers decided to do a deep dive into how Facebook custom audiences work to find out how users’ phone numbers and email addresses get sucked into the advertising ecosystem.

Giridhari Venkatadri, Piotr Sapiezynski, and Alan Mislove of Northeastern University, along with Elena Lucherini of Princeton University, did a series of tests that involved handing contact information over to Facebook for a group of test accounts in different ways and then seeing whether that information could be used by an advertiser. They came up with a novel way to detect whether that information became available to advertisers by looking at the stats provided by Facebook about the size of an audience after contact information is uploaded. They go into this in greater length and technical detail in their paper.

👉🏼 PDF:
https://mislove.org/publications/PII-PETS.pdf

Read more:
https://gizmodo.com/facebook-is-giving-advertisers-access-to-your-shadow-co-1828476051

#DeleteFacebook #Facebook #targeting #advertising #datamining #pdf #why
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Facebook should ban campaign ads. End the lies.

Permitting falsehood in political advertising would work if we had a model democracy, but we don’t. Not only are candidates dishonest, but voters aren’t educated, and the media isn’t objective. And now, hyperlinks turn lies into donations and donations into louder lies. The checks don’t balance. What we face is a self-reinforcing disinformation dystopia.

That’s why if Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube don’t want to be the arbiters of truth in campaign ads, they should stop selling them. If they can’t be distributed safely, they shouldn’t be distributed at all.

No one wants historically untrustworthy social networks becoming the honesty police, deciding what’s factual enough to fly. But the alternative of allowing deception to run rampant is unacceptable. Until voter-elected officials can implement reasonable policies to preserve truth in campaign ads, the tech giants should go a step further and refuse to run them.

This problem came to a head recently when Facebook formalized its policy of allowing politicians to lie in ads and refusing to send their claims to third-party fact-checkers. “We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny,” Facebook’s VP of Policy Nick Clegg wrote.

The Trump campaign was already running ads with false claims about Democrats trying to repeal the Second Amendment and weeks-long scams about a “midnight deadline” for a contest to win the one-millionth MAGA hat.

After the announcement, Trump’s campaign began running ads smearing potential opponent Joe Biden with widely debunked claims about his relationship with Ukraine. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter refused to remove the ad when asked by Biden.

In response to the policy, Elizabeth Warren is running ads claiming Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg endorses Trump because it’s allowing his campaign lies. She’s continued to press Facebook on the issue, stating “you can be in the disinformation-for-profit business, or you can hold yourself to some standards.”

👉🏼 Read more:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/13/ban-facebook-campaign-ads/

#DeleteFacebook #ads #lies #advertising #political #disinformation #dystopia #why
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📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_ES

Noyb files complaint against Google under GDPR, saying Android Advertising ID can be tracked

Every phone has an Android Advertising ID and it can be used to track your phone’s actions – and tied back to your identity. A privacy advocacy group called Noyb – European Center for Digital Rights has filed a legal complaint with the Austrian Data Protection Agency against Google under Europe’s GDPR law. Noyb stands for None of Your Business – and that’s exactly how activists feel about the use of the Android Advertising ID to track Android users. Noyb was started by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems who has filed privacy cases against Google and Facebook in the past and is deservedly highly celebrated in the privacy community.

‼️ Noyb’s privacy lawyer, Stefano Rossetti succinctly summed up the problem:

“In essence, you buy a new Android phone, but by adding a tracking ID they ship you a tracking device.”

How the Android Advertising ID violates the GDPR
This Android Advertising ID is on by default and does not allow users to opt-out. If you choose not to be targeted by “interest-based ads” that still doesn’t get rid of the Android Advertising ID. Even if it did, that still wouldn’t be a GDPR compliant for Google to go about this. To be compliant under the GDPR, Google is supposed to get opt-in user consent before setting up any sort of tracking ID. Right now, all users can do is have Google change their advertising ID – which may hinder the ability of third party apps to track your Android device, but doesn’t do anything to stop Google from tracking you with the Android Advertising ID.

👉🏼 Read more:
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/noyb-files-complaint-against-google-under-gdpr-saying-android-advertising-id-can-be-tracked/

#android #google #DeleteGoogle #GDPR #advertising #id #tracking #privacy
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📡@BlackBox_Archiv

Google offers data pledge in bid to win EU okay for Fitbit buy

Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google has offered not to use health data of fitness tracker company Fitbit to help it target ads in an attempt to address EU antitrust concerns about its proposed $2.1 billion acquisition, the U.S. tech company said late on Monday.

The bid, announced in November last year, would help Google take on market leader Apple (AAPL.O) and Samsung (005930.KS) in the fitness-tracking and smart-watch market, alongside others including Huawei [HWT.UL] and Xiaomi (1810.HK).

“This deal is about devices, not data. We appreciate the opportunity to work with the European Commission on an approach that safeguards consumers’ expectations that Fitbit device data won’t be used for advertising,” Google said in an emailed statement.

Reuters reported last week that such a data pledge may likely help Google secure EU approval for the deal.

With just 3% of the global wearables market as of the first quarter of 2020, Fitbit is far behind Apple’s 29.3% share and also trails Xiaomi, Samsung and Huawei, according to data from market research firm International Data Corp.

👀 👉🏼 When Google listens to you breathe
https://t.me/BlackBox_Archiv/1003

👀 👉🏼 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fitbit-m-a-alphabet-eu-exclusive-idUSKCN24E2X5?taid=5f0cf7d82841fc000146e530

#google #DeleteGoogle #Fitbit #healthdata #advertising #ourdata #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Google says once third-party cookies are toast, Chrome won't help ad networks track individuals around the web

Notes an 'erosion of trust' – gee, wonder who could be responsible for that...

Google says it will not come up with new ways to track individual netizens as they browse the web once Chrome phases out third-party cookies, commonly used for loosely observing people's online activities.

In effect, the browser will not provide ad networks – and Google runs a very large one – alternative identifiers that can be used to follow individuals around the web, though it's not clear exactly how this will impact Google, which already has a variety of ways to shadow internet users.

Early last year, Google announced a plan to kill off third-party cookies, often used to associate you with the websites you visit so that adverts tailored to your interests can be shown on pages. Google made the move after other major browser makers decided to block third-party cookies by default because the little scraps of data can be abused to subvert privacy, and after regulators made it clear they had concerns about ad tech giants Google and Facebook.

Google aims to replace third-party cookies with its Privacy Sandbox, an umbrella term for a set of proposals from Google and other ad tech firms, to allow behavioral ad targeting to continue without individualized tracking identifiers.

Instead, the ad goliath intends to target broad groups of netizens defined by a common interest – eg, jazz fans – through a system called FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), and at narrower groups defined by past interest-based interaction, through a scheme called FLEDGE (First "Locally-Executed Decision over Groups.")

Google plans to start testing FLoC-based cohorts publicly via origin trials in next month's release of Chrome and to make testing available for advertisers in Q2.

The idea has alarmed the ad industry, which isn't keen to give up the ability to track people and has proposed alternatives like a new identifier based on data like email addresses, normally classified as personal information.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/03/google_internet_tracking_pledge/

#google #DeleteGoogle #internet #tracking #advertising #cookies #chrome #browser #thinkabout #why
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📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

DNS over TLS Lets Google Serve You More Ads

Like a lot of people, I hate advertisements. In my quest to remove ads as much as possible, I've installed an ad blocker in my browser. To go further, I've installed Pi-Hole to block ads for all devices on my home network. I've even setup firewall rules to re-route all DNS traffic through Pi-Hole. This setup seemed to work pretty well until I noticed I was still seeing ads in an app on my Android phone.

Sometime in the last couple of years Google added a Private DNS feature to Android and enabled it by default. Private DNS is really DNS over TLS (DoT), which is supposed to be a privacy feature that encrypts your DNS so your network operators can't snoop on what sites you're browsing. It sounds nice in theory, but when I'm at home, I am the network operator, and DoT has a side-effect of making my apps and devices ignore my carefully planned DNS settings, and bypass my (actually privacy enhancing) Pi-Hole ad blocker. The (surely coincidental) outcome is that Google can freely serve ads to my Android device.

You can disable the Private DNS feature in Android (for now). The bad news is that Firefox is enabling DNS over HTTPS (DoH), which is a similar system, with similar drawbacks. Now, you have to change settings not only on each device's operating system, but you might have to individually configure every app to disable DoT/DoH. The next thing I'm going to try is blocking all traffic to public DoT/DoH servers at my firewall.

💡 Update 2021-03-22:
I learned that Firefox supports a temporary workaround for disabling DoH. You can setup Pi-Hole to point the "canary domain" use-application-dns.net to any IP address to cause Firefox to use normal DNS.

https://ericlathrop.com/2021/03/dns-over-tls-lets-google-serve-you-more-ads/

#private #dns #tls #google #DeleteGoogle #advertising #smartphones #workaround
📡 @nogoolag @blackbox_archiv

Ban Surveillance Advertising

As leaders across a broad range of issues and industries, we are united in our concern for the safety of our communities and the health of democracy. Social media giants are eroding our consensus reality and threatening public safety in service of a toxic, extractive business model. That’s why we’re joining forces in an effort to ban surveillance advertising.

Surveillance advertising – the core profit-driver for gatekeepers like Facebook and Google, as well as adtech middlemen – is the practice of extensively tracking and profiling individuals and groups, and then microtargeting ads at them based on their behavioral history, relationships, and identity.

These dominant firms curate the content each person sees on their platforms using those dossiers – not just the ads, but newsfeeds, recommendations, trends, and so forth – to keep each user hooked, so they can be served more ads and mined for more data.

Big Tech platforms amplify hate, illegal activities, and conspiracism – and feed users increasingly extreme content – because that’s what generates the most engagement and profit. Their own algorithmic tools have boosted everything from white supremacist groups and Holocaust denialism to COVID-19 hoaxes, counterfeit opioids and fake cancer cures. Echo chambers, radicalization, and viral lies are features of these platforms, not bugs—central to the business model.

And surveillance advertising is further damaging the information ecosystem by starving the traditional news industry, especially local journalism. Facebook and Google’s monopoly power and data harvesting practices have given them an unfair advantage, allowing them to dominate the digital advertising market, siphoning up revenue that once kept local newspapers afloat. So while Big Tech CEOs get richer, journalists get laid off.

https://www.bansurveillanceadvertising.com/coalition-letter

#ban #surveillance #advertising #thinkabout
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📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Data protection activist Max Schrems: Google illegally tracks Android users

Facebook watchdog Max Schrems is taking on Google. He has filed a complaint in France accusing Google of massive violations of the GDPR - specifically, tracking via advertising ID.

Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems has filed a complaint against Google in France with his privacy association Noyb, alleging that the U.S. tech giant is illegally tracking the use of Android smartphones without the consent of their users. He bases his accusation on the unique advertising ID that every Android smartphone carries.

Accusation: Google's advertising ID allows tracking without consent

These IDs allow Google and its advertisers to track the surfing behavior of Android users in order to target them with suitable advertising. Apple has very similar technology with its Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA).

In the complaint filed Wednesday with France's data protection authority, Schrems accuses the tech giant of conducting "illegal operations" that violate EU data protection laws when creating and storing the advertising ID. In particular, he arguably sees the requirement for prior consent violated.

Schrems is calling on the data protection authorities to launch an investigation against Google. This should reveal Google's tracking practices and ultimately force the company to behave in a DSGVO-compliant manner. In addition, Schrems is calling for the imposition of hefty fines in the event that the authority finds evidence of misconduct.

"Trail of powder" allows detailed tracking

‼️ "These hidden identifiers on your phone allow Google and third parties to track users without their consent," Schrems' privacy lawyer Stefano Rossetti tells the Financial Times, adding, "It's like having a powder on your hands that leaves a trail of everything you do on your phone - from whether you swiped right or left to what song you were listening to."

Google has not yet commented on the allegations. Apple has just impressively proven that Schrems' concerns are not without substance by wanting to make the use of the advertising ID subject to consent in the upcoming iOS update.

(Paywall) https://www.ft.com/content/4617cc99-3ed2-49e1-b97f-db4f1b45b5db

https://t3n.de/news/google-trackt-android-1371162/#%E2%80%9ESpur_aus_Puder%E2%80%9C_erlaubt_detailliertes_Tracking

#dataprotection #android #advertising #id #user #tracking #illegal #gdpr #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv