Comment by pmuse

4 hours ago

UPDATE:

I've tried selectively enabling and disabling Safari extensions and it seems to be related to the Wipr 2 content blocker.

Removing that. Caution to anyone else who uses it.

Apologies to Meta.

6 comments

pmuse

Reply
schleck8  3 hours ago

That does not sound plausible at all, wipr is an adblocker. No adblocker should be causing this. If it's spoofing your JS fingerprint and Meta uses that for suggesting accounts, wow would that be ridiculous.

  • gcr  3 hours ago

    My guess (pure speculation) is that Wipr sets the fingerprint to a well-known value for privacy / anonymization reasons, and Meta is indeed using that to suggest related accounts.

  • pmuse  3 hours ago

    Wasn't something I expected -- seems to be related to having Wipr Extra enabled. Emailed the dev about it and will share if I hear anything back. For now I have it uninstalled and have not experienced this since. Recorded a video of enabling Wipr Extra and the auth page refreshing to show three random people, might be a pain to redact it but I can try to if people really don't believe me.

demibabs  3 hours ago

I’m confused as to how a content blocker could cause this. Could someone more knowledgeable than me elaborate?

  • manquer  1 hour ago

    Meta is using some fingerprint ID to recommend connecting accounts . - you don’t see the accounts itself(beyond the name ) unless you are able to login verify ownership.

    The WIPE/privacy extension developer is using a pre-existing(hard-coded or generated) fingerprint to “mask” the user from meta .

    Meta implemented a quality of life feature powered by the ability to set cookies and track you across the web of course and help users with forgotten accounts to unify them - but not a security issue you cannot do anything unless you are proving access governed by standard auth protocols ; the extension developer’s hack to mask created a broken experience because of the reused IDs.

    Adblockers can create unintended effects , it is hard to reverse engineer complex platforms like meta and also hard to keep up to date with billion dollar companies code updates by small indie teams of volunteers ; doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use them, just be aware that it may happen when enabled