A pretty lady was on my friend request page. I didnt know her but who am I to say no to a pretty lady. Lo and behold I get a picture from her today on my homepage. Mo big deal. However with the pic she had a link to her TER profile. Havent seen that before. And she is 3000 miles awsy. Blocked.

the extent of my social media is right here!

I'm old enough to remember when I had tons of paper "junk" mail delivered to my mailbox.  Where did these people get my name?  There was no internet, then.

IOW, I'm saying that nothing has changed except the medium by which we're spied on.

In the old days , EVERYBODY got similar junk mail and everybody had a cover story to explain it. When a Sears Tool Catalog shows up in the mail for a 10 year old girl scout, it's funny and everybody has a similar experience of their own, including the lingerie catalog sent to the 55 year old carpenter.  Adult material was not sent out to the same extent or at all. To the best of my recollection, I never received unsolicited adult material in my physical mailbox and DEFINITELY anything from strippers or escorts.
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Social Media is VERY different. It's nefarious tentacles grow on their own and can link you up with people who know you from every direction. I have a fake account that I don't even use on a SM site and I get email notifications titled "Do you know Sam, Fran, Ari, or Pat?" who are all people that I know in my REAL email account or have touched on via their web pages (job profile page; personal website page).  
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SM is insidious. It will comb your computer, your cookies, your contact lists and who knows what else to try to CONNECT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, whether they want to be connected or not.
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SOCIAL MEDIA. AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE THAT IT IS.

Or if you have social media apps on the same phone you use to contact escorts... then you may get some unpleasant surprises of this nature.

Social media apps will search your browsing history to see which sites you've visited, who you're emailing, etc. So if they see you emailed Ms. Sally Sux, they may suggest that you follow "her" on Twitter. Or, if you're looking at penny loafers, Facebook may post sponsored ads for similar shoes in your newsfeed. However, it only works if you use the same browser (say, you use Chrome for both shopping and Facebook). It won't work if you use Safari for shopping, and Chrome for Facebook (although, maybe they'll get that capability at some point).  

 I don't use social media on my phone, at all. I *only* do hobby stuff via VPN (my go-to choice right now is TOR).  

Some email providers (protonmail, hushmail) are encrypted and supposedly protect your privacy by not sharing cookies w/other sites.

This might sound conspiracy laden, but I assure you, everything I am about to say is well supported. I'm not going to bother to cite sources because I am quite busy to day and am honestly using this post to procrastinate doing actual work.

Social media or rather, social networking, is an advertising platform that requires data analysis to work well. This data analysis has become extremely accurate.

 
So take impposter for instance, he's not on social media so he's safe right? Nope, not at all. The minute he signs up for facebook they'll know him enough to send him relevant ads. How? well in a word, demographics.

 
As fate would have it, our monkey brains are basically all the same, and as much as we pump up this idea of "individuality" we're all very much conformists at heart and exceedingly predictable. The fact is, they have tens of thousands of people just like impposter, you, and I to pull data from. Even if we "opt out" of this direct data gathering we're still able to be profiled and predicted by these advertising systems.

 
So why is this bad? It's just ads right?

 
Therein lies the problem. A platform with this kind of predictive power can be used for predicting anything. We're talking about predicting if someone is a terrorist, or evading taxes, or likely to commit all sorts of crimes. This isn't quite  the 'Minority Report' pre-crime cognates, but it's scary accurate and the NSA is absolutely using it (via the PRISM program and others).  
The way this works is that the NSA/FBI/Local LE compile their data together and add it to facebook's (and others) data to model behavior and predict who might be worth watching closely. Given that the "patriot" act has been extended to subvert most of your 4th amendment rights, this is all legal and off book.

They already have what they need to track you even if you use different browsers. It's called your MAC address and every device has one. Even if it's been a year and you only logged in once and visit again with the same device they have a record of it.

Tor and VPN's can anonymize your location but many other things can lead back to you.  

Social media was designed to bring people together. It's certainly not designed for clandestine activity or privacy. I suspect that some of the hookers using social media are going to be sorry they ever used it.

I don't believe that websites are generally are able to see MAC addresses. If you have a static IP, then a site can track your individual machine, but it's getting rarer and rarer for any computer to have a static IP. If you have a proxy server or VPN, then a site cannot see your IP address (it will see the proxy's IP).  

Besides, MAC addresses do not help websites share or remember information about what you're doing on that machine/browser. Cookies do (they store information, within ONE browser). Social media (which is built to be used by a browser) use cookies, beacons, and stored browsing history to make connections.  

At least thus far (as far I know, at least) different browsers are independent in that they do not share cookies and browsing history (in other words, they cannot exchange information about the user's activities). Safari cannot see the cookies, beacons, history, and bookmarks that are stored on Firefox, for instance.

"A web site sees your IP address (or the IP address of a proxy if you're using a proxy server). It can not see your device's MAC address. In fact, your MAC address is part of the low-level network stack and is not propagated from one subnet to another."

"In short, as long as your router is seperated from this server that
you are connecting to by at least one other router (which I'm sure
that you are) they would not have your mac address in their arp
tables.  You can see just how many routers are between you by doing a
"trace router"."

and finally,

"Routers will not pass on this information.  If they did the whole Internet would come to a screeching halt because there would be so many broadcasts that the real data would be choked out.  They only need to
know how to get to the next hop."

I think you meant static IP.  

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/765054.html

and

https://www.quora.com/Do-the-websites-I-visit-see-my-mac-address-is-it-possible-for-a-website-to-see-its-users-mac-addresses

Sorry, but you are way off on this. Any website can log your MAC address. If you log into Facebook under one name and later another name but with the same device their algorithms can indeed match things up. Cookies, IP#'s and web browsers are not the only way you can be logged.

I wish I had my "geek squad" to come post on here but they often get MAC addresses from a java script that's run on the web pages. I may have it confused with IPV6 but it's the same principle.  

Here is a thread that explains one of the methods Facebook uses to track you.

Why not find some reputable information backing this up? That way, we can all be correctly informed going forward

It would be highly interesting if websites DID have access to MAC addresses. It would be MUCH easier for TER, for instance, to prevent users from having multiple accounts. In fact, it would be SO easy that I'm sure websites would prefer to track MAC addresses, rather than track the many different factors - IP, cookies, browser type/version, browser size (exact dimensions can help identify a machine), etc. that are conventionally used.

It would also make it tons easier for websites - banks, for instance - to verify a user logging in. I wouldn't have to go through the process of entering my SSN, and getting a code texted to my phone, every time I clear cookies (which is pretty often). I mean, they could very clearly identify that it's ME, from my MAC address... particularly if I tell them to trust my computer. I mean, even if I did have a new IP and cleared cookies, they could still see that I was logging in from the same machine... right?? (Gosh, JP Morgan Chase must really need to get on top of that!)

FWIW, I've worked with web programming languages... PHP, .NET etc. can detect and store a lot of info about a user. But unless there's some secret function I don't know about, there's no way to write a function or script to get a user's MAC address. (And if there were, why would they keep it a secret? It would be a highly valued commodity for the reasons mentioned above).  

As I said, I'd be very interested to know if websites WERE able to access my MAC info. SO, if you can provide some reputable info verifying this, I think it would be extremely informative for all of us trying to protect our privacy online

Here are some quotes taken directly from the discussion:

 
1) "It is not a MAC (hardware address) - it is an IPv6 address. They are two completely different entities."

2) "Why do you insist on calling it a "MAC" address? Because of the colons?

A MAC address is comprised of six double hexadecimal digit numbers separated by colons.

What you are looking at is a hexadecimal number with colons, but having no double-hex digits. Six quad-hex plus two single hex.

IPv6 is not the same as MAC. And one other point: Your machine IPv6 IP address is unique to your computer. With IPv4 IP addresses and NAT, Facebook could only see one IP address, and not distinguish between multiple LAN connections. With IPv6, Facebook can distinguish between different LAN devices."

And finally:  

3. "You need to actually learn IPv6 to understand why it is not a MAC address."

I could keep going, but NO post identifies it as a MAC address and all posters are equally incredulous that anybody could have come to that conclusion.

-- Modified on 5/25/2017 3:48:32 PM

The MAC address doesn't get sent outside of your LAN. The MAC of your modem is known by your ISP, and they keep track of who has what ipv4/6 address at a given time, and even that isn't exposed outside of the ISP's network.

 

Further, a MAC address isn't identifying in any way because you can edit the MAC address your computer exposes to the LAN, so even if your LAN is compromised (which you would have many, many other problems at that point) the MAC of the device you're using is still pretty worthless.

 
Speaking of which, it's very likely if you have any appliance, light bulb, thermostat, etc that is internet connected that it is venerable to outside attack, which makes the entire network those devices live on completely insecure.

 
My point being here, if the boogieman is going to come get you, he's going to use something you've never even heard of to blow your doors right open and 99% of us aren't clever enough to stop him. The best thing you can do is stop yourself from being "low hanging fruit" by being somewhat secure.  

Remember, as long as the people who are able to catch you don't have the resources to go after you, you'll be fine.

It's trivial to change a MAC address, it's also trivial to spoof it to gain access to a network that is using MAC whitelisting.  

 
https://thehacktoday.com/spoofing-mac-address-windows-linux/

Social media can also be tracked, screen shot, forwarded, shared, saved, and linked via phone numbers and other identifiable means if one is not careful.

I once tried a hobby twitter account because a few of the ladies I see have one. It was fun until a friend I know somehow linked to my hobby account and could see who and what I was saying.  I was not careful enough and decided the risk was not worth it. And canceled my account. The same ladies have personal pages, emails and hobby phones. I can just keep in contact with them that way.

I agree that the hobby will continue to evolve with the times and technology, but not comfortable with the whole Twitter thing (at least not yet).

I'm not a geek and when it was explained to me I probably confused the firewall at the company LAN with web pages. Hopefully a real computer security expert can come in here and explain it

That does not change my feelings towards social media.  

I said:

"Social media was designed to bring people together. It's certainly not designed for clandestine activity or privacy. I suspect that some of the hookers using social media are going to be sorry they ever used it."

It used to be the only time I knew any personal info about a hooker was if they were subject to media attention or got themselves busted.

In recent years I've found all kinds of info and it usually goes back to social media. It's very easy to absent mindedly log into social media using the wrong browser, E Mail etc.

This can be useful since it helps me avoid butterfaces and I can use the information to find out their real age. Being a nice guy I would never use the information in a malicious manner.

Still, it would not be there if it were not for social media. Furthermore nobody knows how many more sophisticated algorithms will be conceived of and used to tie identities together in the future.

SOCIAL MEDIA. AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE THAT IT IS.
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Thanks, everybody, for explaining some of the details and warning of possible things to come. justsauce, VooDoo, OTM, 125, and many others in posts over the past many years have described the technical and non-technical aspects of SM and its ability to ruin your life. I have been posting my summary statement for years:  
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SOCIAL MEDIA. AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE THAT IT IS.
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Hey. Let's be careful out there.