We didn’t click ‘consent’ on any gambling website. So how did Facebook know where we’d been?
In an experiment, they surfed sites without making a wager or agreeing to data sharing. Our Meta feed filled up with betting ads Revealed: gambling firms secretly sharing users’ data with Facebook without permission
A Facebook user logs into their account and is bombarded with dozens of gambling ads. The promotions for online casinos and betting sites offer free spins, “bet boosts”, discounts and bonuses.
But the person has never placed a bet or played a game on a gambling site before – let alone consented to being targeted. How can that happen?
The Observer conducted an experiment to find out how potential gambling customers are being tracked, profiled and targeted online.
To do this, we visited 150 gambling websites run by companies with licences to operate in the UK. First, we took a note of whether the website asked for consent to use data for marketing purposes. Then, without clicking to “agree” or “decline” the use of any data, we looked at the network traffic.
By doing this – and using an official Meta application called Pixel Helper – we were able to see a record of the data being shared with Facebook’s parent company, Meta.
In many cases, no data was shared. But in about a third of cases, the testing found that a tracking tool called Meta Pixel had been embedded into the website – and was being triggered automatically upon loading the webpage. This was sending a report to Facebook about which webpages we had visited, linked to a unique user ID.
In some cases, Facebook was also sent data on which buttons we had clicked, and other browsing activity. One site told Facebook when we clicked a button indicating we might place a bet on the Everton v Liverpool match scheduled for next week. Another told Meta that we had clicked to view a promotion for 100 free spins.
At no point did we ever click to “agree” or “accept” the use of our data for marketing – or consent to it being shared. But when we logged back into Facebook a few days later, the feed was full of gambling ads.
These ads were from a range of brands – including many whose own data-sharing practices had not broken any rules. This is because once data is shared with Meta, it is ingested into its targeted ads system and is used to profile people based on the things Meta thinks they like.
That means Meta can then sell ads to companies wanting to target a particular audience – whether that is pet owners, women seeking fertility treatment, people who love Taylor Swift, or potential gambling customers.
Advertisers can also target potential new customers that Meta thinks will be interested in their brand, including “lookalike” customers who have been profiled by the social media giant as being similar to their existing customers based on things such as their demographic characteristics, interests and behaviour.
In the Observer’s testing, the Facebook user had also been profiled as someone interested in “real money gaming”, according to account records – so it’s possible that ads could have appeared as a result of targeting in this way.
The investigation raises serious questions for regulators about how they are monitoring marketing practices of this sort.
During the testing, we noticed that many of the gambling sites sharing data unlawfully had automatic opt-in consent processes that assume people are happy for their data to be shared based on the mere fact that they are using the website. One consent banner read: “We use cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you continue to use this website we assume you are OK with this.”
This appears to be in breach of data protection regulations. The ICO says consent must be both “unambiguous and affirmative”, and that relying on pre-ticked boxes or a failure to opt out is insufficient. Yet the practice is widespread.
There are also questions about the role of Meta – which profits from selling ads using data transmitted to it, even in cases where it was shared unlawfully.
We have previously written about how other organisations – such as police forces, NHS trusts and a political party – misused Meta Pixel to track website users. In some cases they shared data with Meta on sensitive things such as health problems and reporting crimes. But the barrage of gambling ads that were served on Facebook as a result of this testing was far more intense than anything we had seen before.
Heather Wardle, professor of gambling research at the University of Glasgow, said the “untamed marketing” was “hugely risky”. “If you are already experiencing difficulties from gambling, it is likely to make you gamble more,” she says.
The Freedom Scientific training team offers ongoing opportunities for you to join us in live training sessions and advance your skills. We’re excited to announce our jam-packed February training sc…
Learn how JAWS scripting improves accessibility in workplace software, helping screen reader users navigate digital tools efficiently and independently.
Die seltsame Erblindung cartoons.guido-kuehn.de/die-se… Nach konservativen Polizeiangaben waren bislang nach der versuchten Erpressung von Merz mit der AfD spontan über 1.3 Millione…
It's not perfect, but it's quite usable, you can sync encrypted notes up to a server and use it anywhere, like on your phone, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. It has collaboration as well, so you can share an entire notebook and work on things together. It has around 200 official plugins, like a journal mode, you can make notes public so people can read it, and a lot of cool things that just work out of the box. It can send you native notifications as well from a todo list.
Yeah it's nice. I got the basic cloud plan with edu discount cuz I'm not confident enough in my hosting skills but once that subscription expires, which won't be that soon, I might also try selfhosting.
It recently became accessible, yes. I tried it a year or two ago and it was unusable but there has been a lot of work put into it and now it has everything I ever need, including templates which none of the notetaking apps had so far.
It's defenitly! The only thing I've considered as a bit annoying so far is the settings dialog on windows, because whenever I switch tabs its telling me some randomm setting from the task, like I switch to general and NVDA is already saying something about English US even though I haven't even moved to that languages list but I was to lazy to report and no idea how to properly formulate that and it doesn't make it unusable or something so heh. The general experience is fine. Also on android and I appriciate that because my previous app was ok on windows but horrible on mobile.
Managed to get it to build on ARM since it was missing a dependency, also half of the environment variables are missing from the .envSample, but for the most part it's quite straightforward. Let me know if you need some help in the future, it's really worth it just for the collaboration part alone.
Diesseits und jenseits des Atlantiks schaffen Politiker gerade die #Barmherzigkeit ab. Das hat mich veranlasst, noch einmal das Gleichnis vom barmherzigen #Samariter zu lesen. Es ist einfach zu verstehen, aber offenbar nicht für alle leicht zu akzeptieren. horstheller.wordpress.com/2025… #Trump #Merz
„Have Mercy, Mr President!“ Das sagte die mutige Bischöfin Anfang Januar 2025 im Gottesdienst an den amerikanischen Präsidenten gerichtet. Habe Erbarmen! Mr President schaute die Predigerin mit fin…
@FreakyFwoof @jscholes Yeah, I conveniently located myself to Paris for this weekend. But the worry, but russia flips the switch early, leaving Estonia without power was real. Power generator sales were soaring in january.
@jakobrosin @FreakyFwoof @jscholes I hope Estonia will soon switch to other energy sources. Syncing with the European energy network is a good first step. I am sort of surprised that Estonia still depends on Russia in anything. Good move re Paris.
@vick21 @FreakyFwoof @jscholes I'm honestly surprised that our border to russia is still open. Have no idea why, while everyone else has had a clear decision on it.
OpenAI changes ChatGPT o3-mini to work more like DeepSeek-R1, but faces backlash from users | Tech Radar "...Some other users responded by suggesting that OpenAI was simply responding to the threat offered by the new DeepSeek by copying the way it presented the reasoning chain in its R1 model. “Finally DeepSeek changing the O-World for us,” replied ..." techradar.com/computing/artifi…
GeForce RTX 5090 fails to topple RTX 4090 in GPU compute benchmark while RTX 5080 struggles against RTX 4070 Ti | Notebook Check "The GeForce RTX 5090 has failed to overtake its predecessor in a GPU compute benchmark on the well-known PassMark database site. ..." notebookcheck.net/GeForce-RTX-…
The GeForce RTX 5090 has failed to overtake its predecessor in a GPU compute benchmark on the well-known PassMark database site. The RTX 5080 suffered a similar fate, with the card barely managing to beat out the RTX 4070 Ti.
📧 “Still using an email from your internet provider? Bad idea. If you leave, your email is gone. Get a Gmail or Outlook account—it’s future-proof!" 👉 More at bit.ly/4aE4PrM
Get ready to have your tech world rocked every week with Steven Scott and Shaun Preece on Double Tap! These guys are the ultimate duo - mixing humor, passion, and top-notch expertise to keep you in the loop with the latest in assistive tech for blind…
Resurrection of the Daleks first aired 41 years ago on this day in 1984. This action-packed 5th Doctor story from the 21st season saw the return of the Daleks and Davros. This exciting adventure was also Janet Fielding’s swansong as Tegan. #DoctorWho
That was a great episode and the voices of the Daleks were some of the best from the classic series. One thing about that story that always confuses me is when Davros is being told about the Movellan war. At one point, he says something like, "two giant supercomputers warring against one another not able to outhink each other? Fascinating! If only I had been there." But he was there and dealt with that very problem in "Destiny" so why is he reacting like that and why would the writers not have acknowledged this?
@DavidGoldfield Resurrection of the Daleks sort of did for the Daleks in the 80's what Earthshock did for the Cybermen. It totally revamped thei Daleks for a new era, and also put all the continuity of the Daleks into some semblance of order. Yes, it's odd Davros said that as he was present to a degree initially (Destiny of the Daleks), I guess he was speaking rhetorically as he was frozen and imprisoned for much of the time the Daleks war with the Movellans was taking place?
On June 9th 2023 the first annual Access-Ability Summer Showcase was broadcast, showcasing recently released and upcoming video games made by disabled game developers, and featuring accessibility s…
At Your Fingertips: Braille Then and Now – The Braille Doodle In this episode, Chris takes a look at the Braille Doodle, a tool designed for both Braille learning and tactile drawing.
This link has been taken down from the NASA site by someone who probably told themselves as a kid that they would have stood up to the Nazis in the 1930s: nasa.gov/universe/nasa-intern-… Here's the story that Musk and Trump and their goons are so afraid to let you read scitechdaily.com/nasa-intern-f…
When Rose Ferreira first saw an image of a field of galaxies and galaxy clusters from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in July, she “went into the restroom and broke down a little,” she said.
Fixes #16269 - replaces .site domains and domain.com with valid example domains.
There may be other invalid examples, but these were the obvious ones I could find.
Please let me know if there are a...
Here's another one from the "I wonder why MAME emulates this" department. Weight Talker, a talking scale from 1985. We purchased one in 1986. It has five memory positions so you can track how much you have gained or lost for up to five people, a guest button for weighing someone or something without affecting any of the memories, can weigh in pounds or kilograms, memory can be disabled, and when it shuts off it can either say "Have a nice day" or "Goodbye," user selectable. It can also speak in either English or German, though this option isn't configurable on the one we had. In MAME, the weight to be measured is implemented using an analog dial which you use left and right arrows to adjust. Here, I play with it for less than a minute. I have it configured to think its batteries (7 AA cells on the older model or two nine-volt batteries on the newer model) are low.
I did this Hi Curl team, I found a serious buffer overflow issue in bufq.c. Specifically, in the chunk_append function, the buffer is not properly checked before writing, which could result in memo...
what is the motivation here? Is this a sockpuppet account someone is trying to build up credibility for by faking a bunch of legitimate-looking activity? I think that's the case (looks like this account was just created and has opened issues in other repos). But what's the endgame?
Is it just taking the name of the function and then saying hypothetically a function like this could have this issue... without actually checking the real code?
@smallsees my guess is it’s either malicious and meant to waste the maintainers time or just spraying trying to get one thing right so it can look like a contributor to credible projects and then use that reputation maliciously later.
the linked "vulnerability" of a buffer overflow in JAVASCRIPT CODE was just the icing on the cake, like this wouldn't even be a buffer overflow in C because you're not using the hash to index anything, but in JS???
Sábado 8F, plataforma Galiza sen gas realiza acción protesta na Térmica d Sabón, Arteixo, para oposición á utilización d gas Gas fósil, ou gas natural, é 2a fonte enerxía + usada n Galiza, só atrás do petróleo. Supón 20% da enerxía primaria empregada, superando achega d vento e auga Gas non é alternativa a outras fontes enerxía fósil pq contribúe á crise climática, xera dependencia externa, aumenta pobreza enerxética, agranda a débeda ecolóxica co Sur e fortalece o poder do oligopolio enerxético
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Six years after 8K's commercial debut, the higher resolution standard still looks distinctly stalled, with few TVs selling and still hardly anything to watch in that format. pcmag.com/opinions/in-2025-the…
"A group of robocallers impersonating FCC employees made the amateur mistake of trying to scam actual commission employees last year. They likely had no idea they had inadvertently dialed the very regulators responsible for cracking down on them": FINALLY! FCC Gets Tough on Robocall Fraud securityboulevard.com/2025/02/…
This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
Grazie alla collaborazione tra Devol, Open For Future Italia, Ufficio Zero e Feddit ha preso vita fedimercatino.it un mercatino decentralizzato, open source e federato. Il progetto nasce con l’idea di ridare valore agli oggetti inutilizzati, contrastando la cultura dello spreco. Fateci un salto! 🛍️ ♻️
miki
in reply to Pablo Martini (Geezer) • • •