Soccer goalpreviously Facebook parent company, is a company with a tendency to be in the eye of the hurricane when it comes to privacy. In addition to the doubts it has always raised, scandals like Cambridge Analytica, the data leak of more than 500 million users and the Frances Haugen whistleblower have seriously damaged its corporate image, despite its attempts to relaunch. through metaversion.

Obviously, it takes a lot of effort to clean up such a negative image, so Meta tried to explain what it did to prevent unauthorized media from accessing the Facebook (social network) user data that is projected through the URL.

One of the techniques used for data collection is unauthorized scraping using data collection scripts and tools. Meta explained that it is not in favor of implementing it through automated tools that are capable of data scraping by guessing the Facebook ID (FBID) printed in the web browser URL.

Basically, to explain, Facebook URLs have an FBID embedded in them, which allows them to uniquely identify the content shown to a specific user, so that unauthorized trackers can use this to collect very specific data. By comparing the content of the URL with other data points, it is possible to create complete profiles and therefore datasets that will of course become a tradable item, and not exactly through the free channels of suspicion.

To prevent this data scraping, which in some cases comes from unauthorized collection, Meta has replaced FBIDs with Pseudonymized Facebook Identifiers (PFBIDs), which are much more secure and harder to guess. collectors because they are generated based on timestamps that also rotate. Attackers who guess FBID rely heavily on replay, so the introduction of PFBID should be a significant deterrent for them.

As we said before, the data that Meta tries to protect is printed in the URL, that is, in the address bar of the web browser used by the user, so that measures can be taken to protect against malicious actors. For example, Firefox has implemented a feature that allows you to clean a URL of specific data, leaving only those that are used by all users. This is also possible with extensions for other browsers, so there is no harm in taking this precaution if you are a Facebook user.

Finally, although it may be surprising, Meta is interested in implementing this type of measure, not only to avoid the sanctions that fall upon it from time to time, but also to protect its own business model from other parties , with which it has agreements.