As the title states? What is PSA doing in relation to our privacy?
I ask because I ran into some issues while placing an order a short while ago. Being a computer programmer and someone that’s done a lot of web dev (since the late ‘90’s), I started looking at the error and network output in the dev tools.
WhyTF is google and facebook among some of the addresses being requested? Why help these a55holes?
From someone that’s written A LOT of code and designed and built fault tolerant systems, you don’t need this stuff.
That’s not how it works brother. When you request a page (or something) from a site, that page is going to load elements that help it in terms of display and functionality. So that includes images, style information, and logic via javascript.
The problem comes in when those requests are to elements that belong to entities that ARE NOT known to care about your rights or privacy. Here are two examples…
Here’s a screenshot. That’s of THIS thread with the console/network output on the right. The stuff in red is stuff that my browser blocked. Note that on the lines for Facebook and Twitter that on a column on the far right they both say “Socialtracking”.
The software this forum runs on is by discourse, which has many relationships throughout the net, including with Facebook and google.
When I look at that and see that it is mostly scripts I think of the spiders that I use to program to crawl the net for seqrch engine optimization (SEO) If those are crawling discourse then they will crawl the software here as well (just like googled spider crawls other web pages. It is tracking the fact the web page still exists to that it can be cached into their search engine optimization parameters.
As the discourse software is hosted on the PSA website, there is still a connection so that auto updates can be pushed from the discourse development team. They have a system account here solely for that purpose. IIRC, that is a 1 way account in that it doesnt report back to discourse anything but the version of software this forum uses.
Looking at your image on a bigger screen, it seems that your browser is showing cached trackers and websites. If they are cached, the cookie has been there a while and may be from another website you visited (i.e. Facebook). The Google ads do not run here so that isn’t from here, but given their proliferation over the past 20 years they are almost everywhere.
How can those be cached if the above is true AND my browser blocked them?
I run my own DNS servers
I normally run a vpn (didn’t to make the order)
And just because there already is a lot of tracking, we just shouldn’t worry about it?
I’m not a slave. I figured others around here would understand that.
PSA could hire developers to secure this ‘ish and not take the easy way out. I understand that to appease the card processors that “some” things may need to be in place, but after that, it’s either lying or lazy.
Just because you run your own server doesn’t mean spiders dont come through. With the right tools I could easily access your network through packet manipulation. It happens all the time. A private server, a VPN, etc…none of that truly keeps you safe. And if you open a public page like this forum that uses an offsight program like discourse, even with a firewall associated spiders and cookies are going to come through.
With the sophistication of Google ads a cookie can be loaded on your page simply by viewing the ad. Facebook and Amazon capitalize on that.
Its ads and Google etc have spider bots that crawl over forums all over the internet. There are advertisements also. I don’t see anything to worry about.
That is not entirely correct, not that I would bother with a VPN for Palmetto store or Forums. Some VPN providers take care of all of those issues and are there to be used. PIAA for example. But I don’t really care enough to set up my PIAA VPN so that I can geospoof etc. But
