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Imagine this: Someone needs an emergency phone number from you. Let's say it's an employer. So you spit all the time, you expect it to be rarely used if ever, and you do not think about it anymore. Come discover, however, that this person later took your number which was to be used only in very rare circumstances – and began to distribute it freely, say, to a group of telemarketers.
Facebook has landed again in a hot version of the same scenario. In this case, Facebook takes the phone number you provided for two-factor authentication in order to secure your account and uses it to target ads.
"You gave your number to Facebook for security reasons," lamented a post of Electronic Frontier Foundation. "They used it for ads."
Look, part of this should obviously not be a surprise, since Facebook has long since said that its monetization ambitions could not be stopped by any man. And there is apparently no limit to the data points about you that Facebook will use to try to extract another amount. But rest. Facebook not only takes into account the information you have provided to secure your account and use this data to earn money – Facebook indeed admits that this is the case.
Here is a statement that the company gave to TechCrunch"We use the information provided by people to provide a more personalized experience on Facebook, including ads. We clearly know how we use the information we collect, including the contact information that users download or add to their own accounts. You can manage and delete the contact information you have downloaded at any time.
Facebook also said TechCrunch, basically – do not want us to re-use the 2fa phone number you gave us to target ads? Well, friend-o, keep your phone number for you.
This is the kind of thing that has caused so much harm against Facebook as some people quietly encourage and expect to see the result of the hacker who promised to remove the Facebook page of Mark Zuckerberg. Something that the hacker has promised to broadcast on Facebook Live.
By the way, Facebook apparently uses information about you that you have never provided to the company – information that you can not even see or that the company can change, to also target ads against you. That's according to Kashmir Hill with Gizmodo.
"If user A, whom we will call Anna, shares her contacts with Facebook, including a previously unknown phone number for user B, which we will call Ben, advertisers will be able to target Ben with an ad using this phone number." . that I call the contact information in the shade, about a month later, "she reports.
The FEP picks up the thread from there: "This means that even if you have never directly delivered a particular phone number to Facebook, advertisers can still link it to your account using your friends' directories.
None of this data is accessible to users, and European users can not access it despite GDPR's requirements that users have the right to know what information a company has accumulated about them.
It's no wonder that the founders of companies acquired by Facebook are getting along well, frustrated at being mingled with the company's CEO at the same time as a global campaign to monetize user data, seemingly limitless.
Image Source: SHAWN THEW / EPA-EFE / REX / Shutterstock
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