Most people know that Facebook
has information about them. We submit things like
our names, our hometowns, our ages, our birthdays
and our interests, and we assume that Facebook
is collecting that data. But Facebook has much
more data on most people than they realize. Facebook can take all
the data that you submit and combine it with
data from other users and outside information to
construct a profile of you.
Facebook uses nearly
100 different data points to classify your
interests and activities. This would include basic stuff
like your age and gender, but also more
complicated information like whether you
own a motorcycle or you recently went on
vacation or whether youre a gadget geek. Researchers have found
that by using signals such as your likes
and interactions, Facebook could tell if
you were in a relationship or going through a breakup. Facebook doesnt just
know who you are.
It also knows
where you are. If you have location tracking
turned on, Facebook collects an enormous
amount of location data about where youre going,
where you came from, where you live,
where you work, what restaurants and
businesses you tend to go to. And they use this information
to target ads at you. And location data could
reveal other people who live in your house,
even if youre not connected to them
on Facebook.
Now obviously,
Facebook knows what its users buy when they
click on ads from Facebook. But what most
people dont realize is that they have
ways of tracking your offline
purchases as well. For many years, Facebook
has had partnerships with data brokers that
collected information about peoples purchases. So for example, if you buy a
burrito with your credit card, Facebook could know
about that transaction, match it with a credit card
that youve added to Facebook or
Facebook Messenger, and start showing you ads
for indigestion medicine.
One of the most controversial
parts of Facebook data collection is a feature called
People You May Know. And this is where Facebook
uses many different signals of what it knows about you
to determine who else you might be connected to. And this is not always things
that you share with Facebook. It might be contacts
in your phone.
It might be people who have
been in the same room as you. Facebook was using location
data to recommend friends. So it might have
been recommending people who share
a doctor with you or work in the same building. Facebook can also be
used to compile data about your political activity
like protests or marches you go to.
In one case in 2016,
the A.C.L.U. Found that 500 police organizations
had signed up for a service called
Geofeedia, which scraped data from social networks
like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to help
officers look for users who might be in a specific location or attending a specific protest. For example, Geofeedia
claimed it helped the Baltimore Police Department
monitor and respond to the protests after
the death of Freddie Gray. Facebook doesnt just know
who you are, where you are and what you buy.
It also can be used to figure
out what kinds of things you might do in the future. To predict life outcomes, like whether you will be
addicted to substances, whether you will switch
political parties, whether youre physically healthy
or physically unhealthy. These are all part of the
information that advertisers love to know because it helps
them better target users..
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