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       Some musings about some spooky actions from Google and Facebook

Periodically, I will go through my Gmail account [1] just to see what has
accumulated since the last time I checked. Usually it's just responding to
emails saying stuff like “no, this is not the Sean Conner that lives in
Indiana” or “I regret to inform you that I will not be attending your
wedding” or even “I've changed my mind about buying the Jaguar and no, I'm
not sorry about wasting your time.” But today I received an email from Google
titled “Your March Search performance for boston.conman.org” and I'm like
What?

I check, and yes ideed, it's a search performance report for my blog from
Google. I don't use Google Analytics [2] so I was left wondering just how
Google associated my gmail account to my website. I know Google does a lot of
tracking even sans Google Analytics, but they must have really stepped up
their game in recent times to get around that lack.

But no, it appears that some time ago I must have set up my Google Search
Console [3] and I forgot about it. Fortunately, that moves the whole issue
from “pants staining scary” to just “very spooky.” Poking around the site, I
was amused to find that the three most popular pages of my blog are:

* a rant about math textbooks [4];
* a review of a long obsolete BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic
 Instruction Code) IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for a long
 obsolete gaming console [5];
* and some musing about spam [6]

Even more amusing is the search query that leads to the top result—“⅚ cup
equals how many cups”. What? … I … the answer is right there! I can't even
fathom the thought process that even thought of that question.

Wow.

And speaking of “spooky web-based spying” I just realized that Facebook is
adding a fbclid parameter [7] to outgoing links. I noticed this the other
day, and yes, it even shows up in my logs. I would have written about that,
but it seems Facebook started doing this over a year and a half ago, so I'm
very late to the game. But it still leaves one question unanswered—would such
an action drag otherwise innocent web sites into GDPR (General Data
Protection Regulation) [8] non-compliance? It does appear to be a unique
identifier and Facebook is spamming all across webservers. Or does Facebook
somehow know a European website from a non-European website and avoid sending
the fbclid to European websites? I'm just wondering …

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2017/11/07.1
[2] https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/provision/#/provision
[3] https://search.google.com/search-console/about
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2004/01/21.1
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2015/06/16.1
[6] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2018/03/11.1
[7] https://fbclid.com/
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation

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