Comment on Water Snek
purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 5 days agoIn case you are interested, facebook now opens links in a site of thier’s, but it contains an embedded window of the site you were linked to. This means that facebook can follow any other links you follow while on that site. It has the site effect of you not visiting that site but instead facebook’s “hidden window” shows in the history.
It has no practical reason to exist other than allowing them to gather more data.
Some mobile browsers might have an add-in to auto-break you out of the window.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 5 days ago
I’m not actually sure what you mean, but if I’m understanding it correctly, uhh, what? No they don’t. If you click an external link on Facebook they send you to it with a redirect, so they know you went to that site, but they don’t know of any further links you might click.
But anyway, that’s not relevant to this here, because it was a photo shared on Facebook, not an external link.
purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 4 days ago
Ah sorry, I was slightly off, they used their own embedded browser in the app. So your external browser does not save the history as it was not used.
krausefx.com/…/ios-privacy-instagram-and-facebook…
Yea didn’t realise it was just an image, I was responding to the “doesn’t show in history” comment.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 days ago
Oh right. Yeah I haven’t had the Facebook app installed on my phone in like a decade.
But yeah, clicking on an image on the Facebook website doesn’t actually add it to your browser history, because Facebook tries to act like an SPA, a decision they made seemingly specifically to frustrate the user. Because in addition to not adding clicked images to your browser history, they also will refresh the page if you tab away and come back after a minute or two.
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
If I understand what they’re saying (I’m not quite sure either), Facebook basically does a Man in the Middle Attack when you click a link that allows them to see what you click on after leaving their page?
On the one hand, it sounds crazy, but on the other it doesn’t sound outside the realm of possibility based on other things they supposedly do like create shadow accounts of people you and other people know/talk about to build a data profile on them and people they may know so that if they create an account, Facebook already knows what people are in their area and likely in their social circles (and the stuff that they actually do right out in the open where it’s obvious).
Still irrelevant to the issue anyway, but weird to think about. More to the point at hand, I wonder if your issue is caused by Facebook opening the picture in some kind of container instead of the actual page/link itself, like how Reddit opens images on the Reddit page when you try to open them directly - it won’t let you view the image as a source file if you try to open it from a search engine.