This is why I refuse to use Facebook

 

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