There are fewer and fewer of us who remember when privacy was something important, and tried to allow other people their space while insisting on our own. Sadly, the intrusion of technology into every part of our lives has all but destroyed the concept of personal privacy. Certainly, anything and everything one says over any electronic medium must be assumed to be unsafe/not secure.
Facebook is a perfect example of a company that doesn't give a damn about your privacy.
Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data. The Markup helped Consumer Reports recruit participants for the study. Participants downloaded an archive of the previous three years of their data from their Facebook settings, then provided it to Consumer Reports.
By collecting data this way, the study was able to examine a form of tracking that is normally hidden: so-called server-to-server tracking, in which personal data goes from a company’s servers to Meta’s servers. Another form of tracking, in which Meta tracking pixels are placed on company websites, is visible to users’ browsers.
. . .
Despite its limitations, the study offers a rare look, using data directly from Meta, on how personal information is collected and aggregated online.
Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez defended the company’s practices. “We offer a number of transparency tools to help people understand the information that businesses choose to share with us, and manage how it’s used,” Vazquez wrote in an emailed statement to The Markup.
While Meta does provide transparency tools like the one that enabled the study, Consumer Reports identified problems with them, including that the identity of many data providers is unclear from the names disclosed to users and that companies that provide services to advertisers are often allowed to ignore opt-out requests.
One company appeared in 96 percent of participants’ data: LiveRamp, a data broker based in San Francisco. But the companies sharing your online activity to Facebook aren’t just little-known data brokers. Retailers like Home Depot, Macy’s, and Walmart, all were in the top 100 most frequently seen companies in the study. Credit reporting and consumer data companies such as Experian and TransUnion’s Neustar also made the list, as did Amazon, Etsy, and PayPal.
. . .
“This type of tracking which occurs entirely outside of the user’s view is just so far outside of what people expect when they use the internet,” Caitriona Fitzgerald, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told The Markup in an interview. Fitzgerald said that while users are likely aware that Meta knows what they are doing while they are on Facebook and Instagram, “they don’t expect Meta to know what stores they walk into or what news articles they’re reading or every site they visit online.”
There's more at the link.
I've never used Facebook, because I've been aware for a long time of its electronic intrusiveness and deliberate policy of nullifying efforts at personal privacy. Reading that report merely confirms that only those who literally don't care about keeping anything private should be using it.
If our spouses tried to spy on us the way Facebook and its corporate customers do, it would probably be grounds for divorce: yet we ignore or even invite such intrusion every time we use such services. What's wrong with us, and with our society, that we've been conditioned to not just allow, but welcome that? - because if we continue to use Facebook and similar "social media" services after learning about such anti-privacy policies, that's exactly what we're doing.
Peter
12 comments:
Data brokers use small bits of software called bots to sweep up petabytes of information. I've often wondered if we poor humans could use bots generating random data to so pollute this data stream as to make the data useless.
Even if you don't use Facebook, Facebook is using you. The company has an extensive file of your information. When I was a paid advertiser on FB, they offered a 'tracking pixel' service, where you would be paid for placing a tracking pixel on your website. Every time someone loads your page, that pixel is loaded as well, and reports back to FB. They use it to track who you are, what sites you visit, spending habits, etc.
That is then used to build a user profile of you, that they then sell to other companies. It's their entire business model.
There are no secrets on the internet, if you want privacy you need to log off and stay off.
I have never used or been a member of Facebook. I do not trust the owner.
I use it. It has it's limitations, but often times, it's the best way to get a message out, or to find an old war buddy.
They're data-mining me? I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
There is a lot of information about me on the internet. Some of it is even true.
Slightly off-topic - if you think FacePalm is bad, lets talk about mobile phones.
For example Apple iPhones are lovely to behold and a genuinely wonderful melange of convenience and utility. Relatively secure and trustworthy - I use mine all the time for banking, email, google maps, audiobooks & podcasts etc etc etc. Sometimes I even use it as a phone. They just work. Beautifully. Addictively well.
You cannot remove their battery. You cannot actually turn them off. Even when they are powered "off" - while ever they hold charge, they are covertly tracking your movements just like some sort of overgrown an Apple AirTag. Worse, they are extremely expensive to purchase.
Try talking about a topic you never normally would within reasonable proximity of your iPhone (or Samsung). Say, "Gee, I want to go on holiday to Lichtenstein." Watch how ads for Lichtenstein start popping up on the pages you visit with your web browser and on your various social media on your other devices such as laptops. It appears to be interlinked. There HAS to be some sort of program listening all the time, screening for keywords - and it knows exactly who you are, even across devices and platforms.
Knowing all this, it is so hard to stop using them. The "non-smart" alternatives are asininely bad to use for anything other than phone calls. Its a royal PITA to do your banking any other way. Carrying paper maps? Good luck even finding them. My government is increasingly pushing every basic function they can online. Increasingly it is getting harder to even find an office, a branch or do anything in person. Paper records? What are they? Once it's digitised, it doesn't exist if the computer says it doesn't. There is no physical file to prove otherwise. This is being done deliberately - in my opinion.
@ Ed Bonderenka - The issue with facebook etc is while YOU might take certain steps to be relatively anonymous and have all your security settings screwed down, it just takes one twit to share her contacts with facebook to "help find her old friends" that has your real name & phone number (for example) to undo all those precautions and de-cloak you.
As Terry Pratchett had Lord Vetinari say "My policies are perfectly transparent" which ambiguously can either mean that nothing is hidden or you cannot see them at all ... Something to bear in mind when anyone claims, as did Emil Vazquez when he defended the company’s practices. “We offer a number of transparency tools ...".
Phil B
Personally experienced multiple versions of this intrusion. After reading a Denninger article on roasting coffee beans I discussed my interest in it with my wife. Next day, her social media ads were loaded with ads for coffee roasting. Friends insist we must have searched for coffee roasters and so it was cookies or browser history that caused this, but we are both certain that no search ever happened. Deleted several apps from our phones, including the Facebook app from her phone (she now only logs in thru web interface) and haven’t had a repeat. Seems like the problem isn’t the phone itself, but the permissions abused by certain apps.
Another time, I spent a morning researching a replacement for my rugged work boots using my phone. While I have a Facebook account from back in the day, I’ve not logged in for over a decade. My wife, tho, is an active reader in Facebook because various special interest hobby groups. The rest of that day, her phone and laptop received targeted ads for work boots and I was surprised to come home to her asking if I’d been looking up work boots. So my browsing activity on a different device which has never connected to Facebook resulted in targeted ads on my wife’s device. Tracking pixels confirmed. Non-Facebook business websites were reporting my browsing based on IP address to Facebook, which then assumed it was my wife since she is the only Facebook user at this IP address that they know about and adjusted her targeted ads based on that assumption.
Unfortunately Peter, it's a moot point. Facebook is collecting and selling your data even if you never used their products.
Their business and livelihood is data.
Others above have a point though; a big and growing problem is bad data. It's not an issue for advertising, but it will become a big issue when the data is used for something important.
The credit bureaus have a dispute system for that reason.
Jonathan
Never joined fBook, my siblings are all members and seem to spend lots of time unfriending each other. I didn't realize that the fbook monitors the unbookcinnated people too. Time for the worm to turn. Thank all gods for legislators like Ted Cruz and John Kennedy, but more is needed. The medical-industrial complex is ramping up for wuflu2. Cowing the populace into compliance with medical malpractice is part of the function of social media.
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