Facebook is NOT telling YOU everything it really knows about you, and this is why
FACEBOOK doesn’t tell its users just how much knowledge it really has on them – and opting out is a lot more complicated than it need be, a new report by ProPublica has claimed.
By AARON BROWN
Express.co.uk
Sun, Jan 1, 2017
Everyone knows that Facebook holds a lot of information on its users – after all, much of that information is willingly handed over when using the social network.
But what about the information you don’t want to hand over to Facebook?
Well, it turns out Facebook has a number of methods to fill-in those blanks, too.
A new report by New York-based investigative non-profit ProPublica has revealed the vast network of third-party data bought by Facebook in order to uncover even information more about you. Granted, Facebook buying data on its users is nothing new.
The California-based company first signed a deal with Datalogix to keep tabs on consumer spending behaviour back in 2012.
However the report by ProPublica makes it abundantly clear just how much visibility Facebook has into your life – online and offline.
Facebook currently provides a staggering 29,000 individual categories to its advertisers.
These allow advertisers to drill-down and target specific groups amongst the 1.79 billion monthly active users.
Of those 29,000 categories, Facebook says 600 come from third-party data providers.
According to the research conducted by ProPublica, the majority of this data from commercial data brokers is financial.
It allows advertisers to single-out Facebook users in categories including, “total liquid investible assets $1 – $24,999”, “people in households that have an estimated household income of between $100K and $125K”, or even “individuals that are frequent transactor at lower cost department or dollar stores”.
The Rest…HERE
