fcbsd

*BSD bod

  • he/him

OpenBSD on the Desktop,
since 2001

Glasgow


lea
@lea

They're just fucking with you and trying to make it look more difficult that it actually is. You have time until June 25 but they know you'll forget so let's do it now:

  1. go to this link on the Facebook website
  2. fill in your country and e-mail address of your account
  3. there is no human checking what you say in the text box for "Please tell us how this processing impacts you." They're just fucking with you. You could literally AI generate your objection and it would be fine. Off the top of my head:

My privacy will be violated if my data is used to train generative AI. It's unknown how my data will be used to generate AI output and if such output will contain my data. I worry that my posts, photos, and other content could be published without my consent. I disagree with such use and consider it to be violation of my privacy.

I don't even think it needs to be that long. They really hope you get frustrated with writing a few bullshit sentences.

  1. click submit, they'll send an email with an authentication code. in my case, it arrived immediately. how kind of them
  2. enter the code, click confirm. your request will be approved in a few seconds and you'll get a facebook notification.

fcbsd
@fcbsd

so if you can VPN or proxy from London then you can fill in the form!


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @lea's post:

It should open up when you're logged in. I tried it in a private window, went to the form link and it asked me to log in. I clicked the link in the error message, logged in, it put me on the facebook main page. Then I put the form link address in the address bar and it worked. Are you by any chance on Firefox?

whether it works in the US is a good question. if you're on firefox, you could have the facebook container extension running, but it works for me. last thing i'd try is open up facebook in a tab, be logged in, and put the form link in the address bar. i don't know

The sources I'm finding suggest that this form simply doesn't exist for Americans, or others living without data privacy laws. And honestly, it's not like meta even informed us that they were going to be doing this in the first place. Why would they? Nobody was ever going to make them.

I'm hovering my finger over the deactivate and delete all data button, but honestly, would that even matter? What are the odds that they haven't already fed me to their machine? Or kept a backup on their end that they'll use in my absence? I'd never know, would I? Despicable situation.

It doesn't seem possible to manually set a location with Cloudflare WARP, which unfortunately means it can't help with this, since Facebook needs to think the user is in Europe to serve them the opt out form.

Unless I've missed something, which is very possible, as I'm not good with tech.

Okay, after all of this, and with generous support from @fcbsd, I appear to have been able to submit the opt out form, and just received an email confirming it would be applied moving forward. I may be safe, or at least as safe as possible for the time being.

Huge relief. I hope others can navigate this as well, because it's absurd that any company is just allowed to do this in America.

don't forget to change your proxy settings back, as when I turn off the proxy server your browser will stop working...
and if any one else wants to make use of my proxy server - drop me an ask :~)