Facebook is rolling out a new link schema—to fight privacy browsers and privacy plugins. The updated URLs hide Facebook’s user-tracking IDs so they can’t be stripped off.Firefox and Brave browsers used to be able to strip off these tracking bugs. And there are plugins that did the job for other browsers. But now they’ve all been thwarted by Facebook.Mark Zuckerberg (pictured), speaking in 2019, grandly promised to “replumb” Facebook and “work openly” to support a new “privacy vision.” In today’s SB Blogwatch, we revisit old keynotes that didn’t age well.Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: Kiss.“I’m committed to doing this well.”—M. Zuckerberg, 2019What’s the craic? Martin Brinkmann reports—“Facebook has started to encrypt links to counter privacy-improving URL Stripping”:“Facebook is using encryption now to track users”Facebook has started to use a different URL scheme for site links to combat URL stripping technologies that browsers … use to improve privacy and prevent user tracking. [For example] Firefox removes tracking parameters from web addresses automatically [and] Brave Browser strips known tracking parameters … as well.…It appears that Facebook is using encryption now to track users. … It is no longer possible to remove the tracking part of the URL, as Facebook merged it…
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Two-Faced Facebook: Foils Privacy Plugins by Encrypting URLs – Security Boulevard
