EVE General Discussion

CCP is partners with Oculus Rift

Oculus Rift is owned by Facebook

Facebook has your Eve meta data

CCP owns Eve

...Doesn't take much of a leap to assume

If you really care about your privacy, stop using any service that is free, stop using social media, remove any and all Microsoft software, remove and stop using Google, Yahoo and all that other crap.

Use duckduckgo as your default search engine, use either a paid email hoster that provably cares about your privacy and won't violate it or host a mail server yourself, use pgp whenever possible, absolutely use Tor and when it comes to the Tor browser or Firefox (it looks reasonably okay with the Classic Theme Restorer plugin and some tweaking), the add-ons you defintely want installed are uBlock Origin (take a look at AdNauseam), Cookie Monster (for easier cookie management, as your default policy should be to deny any and all cookies), NoScript and EFF's Privacy Badger.

That should get you started.

Facebook is weird. Recently it suggested one of my neighbours as a Facebook 'friend', despite me never having interacted with them at all other than a brief hello in the hallway.

Im getting peripheral EVE advertising on a lot of sites I frequent, so the metadata issue is far larger than just Facebook.

The inherit stupidity in this is that I am already an EVE player, so the ads are wasted on me.

As to Facebook, Twitter, Google and other metadata accumulators, this is a real problem.

I have doxxed a lot of people (but never in EVE!), to find out who I am dealing with.
Its more often than not ridiculously easy to follow a few trails and heuristically combine them.

People are usually terribly bad at covering their own tracks.

If I can do that, there is no telling what organizations with far more data and resources than I have can do.

The accumulation of data that various internet service providers have garnered off us WILL, mark my words, be a seminal issue in our lifetime.

If they were, they wouldn't be using FB.

Hello! I'm writing from Firefox running the uMatrix extension that gives me control over what elements of webpages can execute commands on my machine.

It sounds complicated, but it's a very simple matrix that dictates what objects you want your browser accessing, and from where.

From a single glance, I can see there are forum site functionality features served through the Optimizely cdn, a data-mining firm that shares all the information it gathers from one site with other corporations and other websites. (edited to say that only by enabling the data-mining optimizely was I able to post on this forum!)

Through various forms of digital fingerprinting, optimizely (which is undoubtedly how facebook acquires our data) creates a profile for every machine it can touch that is permanently stored and shared with every other site you connect to using optimizely or one of its numerous sharing partners. There's a whole internet of data about you and everyone else who uses it, and that information is traded for real money. Some people even believe you deserve a cut, and are fighting for consumer rights to their own personal data. Either they pay you some percentage of what your data is worth, or they stop collecting it, is their argument.

With regards to this particular problem, you can "opt out" of optimizely-specific data-mining on your particular machine, but the cynic in me says "yeah right, they just claim to stop and continue surreptitiously mining you because why not? More to the point, your data probably becomes instantly more valuable by virtue of the fact you don't want it shared."

That link is here:
https://www.optimizely.com/opt_out/

It is time to move on from the "what are you hiding" dismissal of legitimate concerns about the unbridled harvesting of people for their sweet, profitable data and listen to new approaches to the problem of wanton data mining of people just trying to play a videogame (that they already paid to play! Even if it's in the ToS like it is, It's not like Eve is free and we're supposed to be the product like so many other applications).

The solution, in this case, starts with the individual. Research what you can do to protect your own data. I roll with the following Firefox plugins to minimize my digital footprint:
uMatrix
BetterPrivacy (erases a new kind of LSO privacy invading cookie that puts the better known, original cookies to shame. as far as I know, BetterPrivacy is one of the only ways to find and eliminate this powerful new cookie)
uBlock Origin blocks ads and other data-mining domains (use with care, because news agencies, and small bloggers and vid publishers rely on ad income to survive!)

Ultimately, I recommend switching to Linux and making it a hobby to see how far you're willing to go to limit routine privacy violations. It's actually pretty fun, and enlightening too!

I hope this helps

Tbh, I would be _really_ surprised if the link came via CCP.

It's probably friend of friend of friend style stuff.

I mean, I've been linked to people I've worked with in the past. Not at the same company, and I've never talked to him outside of phonecalls and corporate email, but he's still popped up in my 'do you know' list. No mutual friends, but still linked.

There's also possibilities like you both looked at something on Facebook, coming from the same source, on a number of occasions. They're very very good at drawing this kind of conclusion.

By viewing this page in your browser, Facebook is potentially getting your information. I first started getting Eve Online ads in my browser long before I joined the game, simply because I looked up one of those Forbes articles talking about a big battle a couple years ago. That's all it took for them to identify me as someone to target with Eve advertising. If I go to a website and view a product page, I can go back to my other browser tab, refresh Facebook, and insta-magically I have targeted advertising for the exact items I had been viewing. Even days after, I'll have ads for products and websites I had viewed previously, even if I delete the local browser history, cookies, etc. that the typical user would know about and be able to readily delete. If there's anyone to blame, it's our soon-to-be Google Overlords

Well... It looks like those developing these systems are good in gathering information but bad at simple understanding.
For me is was when i bought new smartphone on Ali-Express and after that started to receive advertisements about new phones. Really? You think i'm some kind of shop? I bought the phone and i will need another one in like year or about it. Accessories would be of better use.

Your internet data is constantly being tracked and mined by Internet advertiser, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Various 3 letter agencys. You can try to sterilize yourself from them through various optout programs and data destroyers (sites that were made to throw off the trackers by pumping false info into it) but you will have to give up Facebook, google, yahoo etc and religiously use a TOR browser along with a vpn. Even then it just limits the tracking not eliminate it.