very careful not to disclose any information to steam
proceeds to associate with everyone they were previously friends with on public logs
I just want to point out that if your friends accounts were public like you imply they wouldn’t have even needed to use the site. All the site does is automate the data collection process. The only way to fix it is to make private accounts the default.
No, my point still applies. It sounds like they refriended the new account then set it to private, leaving a trail that could still be manually recorded
I mean, this sucks, but I also wonder how this could be fixed. If you read up what absolutely benign stuff like your physical screen resolution coupled with how quickly you move your mouse coupled with your possible languages ad companies can use to uniquely identify you among the whole world visiting their page, it’s not a long throw at all to uniquely identify someone based on their steam friends.
Isn’t this generally how the big tech firms generate dark profiles on people? Of the people who don’t explicitly exist on their database. Take the intersection of data from family events. The people not in their database of known profiles are also likely family. Do the same for friend events. Take the intersection of those peoples interests. You’ll be knowing a lot about someone who never told you anything about themselves.
You can run but you can’t hide. Crazy times we live in.
It’s just a profile scraper, no? I tried my own and a few of my friends profiles. They were not indexed yet and because they all have private settings you cannot see anything else besides current Display Name and current Profile Picture.
So you should tell your friends to set profile/edit/settings/privacy settings: Friend’s List -> Friend’s only. After that you create a new account and the scraper won’t be able to access their new friend list anymore.
Edit: Also why is this post written that way, I was unsure if AI generated or some attempt at a novel, or am I going crazy??
I found that it read like a fluff dramatization story from a The Guardian opinion piece, only shorter. Those are texts with a lot of words, but there’s usually very little actual substance relative to the length of the text, most is just meandering embellishments. So imo not necessarily ai, humans do write texts in this style as well.
So gist of this is, of they are not some random people hiding, but there’s a real company to -presumably- reap in some ad money or subscription money for their StalkerPlus product.or something, it takes a single determined EU citizen to fuck them up.
interesting, only the most basic info is included about my 19 year old account. I’ve always been very conservative with the info I share online though.
back in the day, everyone was regularly reminded that the internet is a wild west and only by safeguarding your personal information and using pseudonyms and avoiding identifying info can you have a chance to be safe and have a good time. but now that PII is profitable, all the big internet companies tell you the opposite so they can make a buck. I think this is the inevitable outcome of it.
sorry to hear a baddie is clinging to you, that’s always quite troublesome. it can be hard to do anything about it. shitty as it is, your best bet is usually to become an undesirable target: boring. they’re school yard bullies. they do it for the reaction, that’s it. the more you react, the harder they try. fucking assholes.
steam
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.