[ad_1]
Last week, Pew released the results of a survey study how users understand Facebook's data collection practices and how they react to what the platform thinks they know about them. The result is that 74% of users did not know that Facebook is listing their interests and characteristics. 88% of respondents were badigned advertising "categories", which may include racial or ethnic "affinities" and political trends. 58% of these users were "not comfortable" with the company that compiles this information.
By and large, this means that more than half of Facebook users are not satisfied with the major direction of the business model of business – surveillance-based advertising – even after learning more about them. information that the company has obtained by monitoring them. This is not surprising: just knowing how you're tracking does not necessarily make tracking or targeted ads less scary. And while Facebook allows you to control the data that it uses to display your advertisements, it gives you no way to prevent data collection.
We do not know what goes into the determination of your "categories", but this information is probably based on more concrete data that the company knows about you: what you "like", what websites and third-party applications you use and the physical location. your smartphone and your computer. Facebook allows advertisers to target you based on one of these categories of data, as well as more nebulous settings such as "similarity" with other users. Although you may not know, most of this data is visible to average users Ad Preferences Page. In this article, we will review each category of data to explain where they come from and what it means.
What do they know?
Facebook collects data about you in four main ways.
The first is actions you take on Facebook platforms, such as Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook itself, including Liking posts and clicks on ads. You can see a summary of what he knows about you this way under the "Your interests" tab. Every time you act in a Facebook product, it contributes to the profile presented here. Some of the items in this list are specific businesses or pages with which you have interacted, while others are interests that are attributed to you indirectly based on your actions.
Some of these pages are items that I clicked on, and others are "related to" items with which I have interacted. For the record, I do not know why I think I like Taylor Swift.
Below, under "Your Information -> Your Categories", you can see more ways that Facebook ranks you for advertisers. According to Pew, a majority (60%) of users are categorized into 10 or more categories by Facebook, and these categories may include political and ethnic "affinities". About half of the users are clbadified in a political category and 21% are given a "multicultural affinity" by the company.
Facebook's data on my birthday and politics – which I deliberately fuzzed – are false, but his deductions about my travel habits and my home (in San Francisco) are quite accurate.
Secondly, Facebook allows businesses to upload lists of people they want to contact directly with contact information. For example, if a department store collects e-mail addresses as part of a rewards program, it can tell Facebook to target ads on all people for which it has an e-mail. It also allows advertisers to target people using other data sources, such as publicly available voter registries or lists of names purchased from data brokers. Facebook often treats this data in hashed or hidden form, and claims not to save or use it for purposes other than this direct targeting. You can see the companies and groups that targeted you this way under "Advertisers -> Who used a contact list added to Facebook".
The companies present here have targeted me with advertisements using their own lists of contact information, possibly including my name, my email address or my phone number. Facebook allows companies to badociate any of these identifiers with a Facebook profile to serve ads.
Third, Facebook tracks your activity on the rest of the Internet. Thanks to technology like pixel tracking and Facebook's third-party ad network, Facebook can track much of your business on other websites and in different apps on your phone. According to our own research, Facebook uses pixels or other cookie sharing code on about 30% of the first 10,000 Web sites. And according to his own marketing literature, the company's tracking technology is used in 32% of the top 500 Android apps and reaches 1 billion people a month. Under "The website or application you visited", you can see a list of advertisers that Facebook considers with whom you have interacted in this way. The data recorded here may include activities of any device or browser that you used to connect to Facebook in the past, so some of this information may not belong to you.
This type of third-party tracking can be stopped with Privacy Badger!
Finally, Facebook can collect location data via its applications (including Instagram and Messenger), asking to "know your location" in your browser and connecting to the place where you connect to the Internet. It uses this data to serve placement-targeted ads as well as determine when specific people visit brick and mortar stores, part of its efforts to connect digital ad impressions to purchases in the storage space. Even with a good understanding of how it works, researchers discovered incredibly difficult to extinguish targeting geographic announcements on Facebook.
Knowledge, not power
Facebook shows you a bit of what they know about your business and lets you know who can target you with certain types of ads. But it does not give you any control over how it collects or uses your data.
Under Ad Settings, you can turn off the display of targeted ads in a variety of ways: You can opt out of targeted targeted ads. sure Facebook using the collected data of Facebook (for example, with pixels) and you can turn off the ads you see on the web that are targeted by your activity. sure Facebook. These two solutions can help if you're tired of the same advertisement for an electric toothbrush tracking you in cyberspace, but they do not do anything to prevent the collection of your data.
You can also disable the display of individual advertiser announcements by clicking on the small "X" located in the upper right corner of each icon, one at a time. There is no way to disable ads from a single bulk source. And if you want to prevent advertisers from targeting you based on your location or contact information, you're in luck.
So what's the point? We welcome Facebook's progress on transparency. This window on its targeted advertising ecosystem is simpler and more granular than many of its competitors, who for the most part perform the same type of tracking. But without significant means to act on this data, the page is mainly used to remind that Facebook follows you everywhere.
Fortunately, you can take things in hand. You can uninstall or disable mobile applications from Facebook to stop the essential tracking of the company's location. And you can install Privacy Badger Third party tracking on the web, including through the pixels and buttons I like from Facebook. The more users learn what Facebook does, the more they can make informed decisions about their privacy, including lobbying lawmakers and businesses to improve their performance.
Source link
