Yikes Let s Try Tat One Again
Tech Set
I Downloaded the Information That Facebook Has on Me. Yikes.
Video
transcript
transcript
Does Facebook Know You Meliorate Than You Practice?
What makes you tick, whom y'all know, where y'all become, even where you might terminate upwardly. The information you share in your contour is a mere snippet of what Facebook and its partners really know nigh you. Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The Times, explains.
-
Most people know that Facebook has information virtually them. We submit things like our names, our hometowns, our ages, our birthdays and our interests, and nosotros assume that Facebook is collecting that data. Merely Facebook has much more than information on near people than they realize. Facebook can take all the data that you submit and combine it with data from other users and outside information to construct a profile of you. Facebook uses near 100 different information points to classify your interests and activities. This would include basic stuff similar your historic period and gender, just also more complicated data like whether you own a motorbike or you lot recently went on holiday or whether you lot're a gadget geek. Researchers have found that by using signals such as your likes and interactions, Facebook could tell if you were in a relationship or going through a breakup. Facebook doesn't just know who you are. It also knows where you are. If you accept location tracking turned on, Facebook collects an enormous amount of location data about where you lot're going, where you lot came from, where you lot alive, where yous work, what restaurants and businesses y'all tend to get to. And they apply this data to target ads at you. And location data could reveal other people who live in your house, even if yous're not continued to them on Facebook. Now apparently, Facebook knows what its users purchase when they click on ads from Facebook. But what nearly people don't realize is that they have ways of tracking your offline purchases besides. For many years, Facebook has had partnerships with data brokers that collected information well-nigh people's purchases. So for instance, if you purchase a burrito with your credit bill of fare, Facebook could know near that transaction, lucifer it with a credit carte du jour that you've added to Facebook or Facebook Messenger, and offset showing you ads for indigestion medicine. One of the virtually controversial parts of Facebook data drove is a feature called "People You lot May Know." And this is where Facebook uses many unlike signals of what it knows about you to make up one's mind who else y'all might be connected to. And this is not always things that you share with Facebook. Information technology might exist contacts in your telephone. It might be people who have been in the aforementioned room every bit you. Facebook was using location information to recommend friends. And then it might accept been recommending people who share a medico with yous or piece of work in the same edifice. Facebook can besides be used to compile data virtually your political activity like protests or marches you go to. In one case in 2016, the A.C.L.U. plant that 500 police organizations had signed up for a service called Geofeedia, which scraped data from social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to help officers wait for users who might be in a specific location or attending a specific protest. For instance, Geofeedia claimed it helped the Baltimore Police Department monitor and reply to the protests later on the death of Freddie Grey. Facebook doesn't but know who you are, where y'all are and what you purchase. It likewise tin can be used to figure out what kinds of things you might do in the future. To predict life outcomes, like whether you will be addicted to substances, whether yous will switch political parties, whether you're physically healthy or physically unhealthy. These are all part of the information that advertisers beloved to know considering it helps them better target users.
When I downloaded a re-create of my Facebook data last week, I didn't await to encounter much. My profile is sparse, I rarely post anything on the site, and I seldom click on ads. (I'one thousand what some call a Facebook "lurker.")
But when I opened my file, it was like opening Pandora'south box.
With a few clicks, I learned that nearly 500 advertisers — many that I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band — had my contact data, which could include my e-mail address, telephone number and full name. Facebook besides had my unabridged phone book, including the number to ring my apartment buzzer. The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted from my friends list over the last fourteen years, including my exes.
There was so much that Facebook knew nearly me — more than I wanted to know. Simply later on looking at the totality of what the Silicon Valley visitor had obtained well-nigh yours truly, I decided to try to better understand how and why my data was collected and stored. I also sought to find out how much of my data could be removed.
How Facebook collects and treats personal information was central this calendar week when Marker Zuckerberg, the company'south master executive, answered questions in Congress about information privacy and his responsibilities to users. During his testimony, Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly said Facebook has a tool for downloading your data that "allows people to see and have out all the information they've put into Facebook." (Those who want to download their own Facebook information can use this link.)
But that'due south an overstatement. Most bones data, similar my birthday, could not be deleted. More important, the pieces of data that I found objectionable, like the record of people I had unfriended, could not be removed from Facebook, either.
"They don't delete anything, and that's a full general policy," said Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, which offers cyberspace privacy tools. He added that data was kept effectually to somewhen help brands serve targeted ads.
Beth Gautier, a Facebook spokeswoman, put it this way: "When you delete something, we remove information technology so it'due south not visible or attainable on Facebook." She added: "You can also delete your account whenever you want. It may take up to ninety days to delete all backups of information on our servers."
Earthworks through your Facebook files is an practice I highly recommend if you care about how your personal information is stored and used. Here's what I learned.
Facebook Retains More Data Than Nosotros Think
When you download a copy of your Facebook data, yous will see a folder containing multiple subfolders and files. The nigh important 1 is the "alphabetize" file, which is substantially a raw data ready of your Facebook account, where you can click through your profile, friends list, timeline and messages, among other features.
I surprising part of my alphabetize file was a section called Contact Info. This contained the 764 names and phone numbers of everyone in my iPhone's address book. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that Facebook had stored my entire phone volume because I had uploaded information technology when setting up Facebook's messaging app, Messenger.
This was unsettling. I had hoped Messenger would use my contacts list to find others who were also using the app so that I could connect with them hands — and hold on to the relevant contact information only for the people who were on Messenger. Yet Facebook kept the entire list, including the phone numbers for my car mechanic, my flat door buzzer and a pizzeria.
This felt unnecessary, though Facebook holds on to your telephone volume partly to keep it synchronized with your contacts list on Messenger and to aid find people who newly sign up for the messaging service. I opted to turn off synchronizing and deleted all my telephone book entries.
My Facebook information also revealed how little the social network forgets. For example, in addition to recording the exact engagement I signed upward for Facebook in 2004, at that place was a tape of when I deactivated Facebook in October 2010, just to reactivate it four days later — something I barely recollect doing.
Facebook besides kept a history of each time I opened Facebook over the last 2 years, including which device and web browser I used. On some days, it fifty-fifty logged my locations, similar when I was at a hospital two years ago or when I visited Tokyo last year.
Facebook keeps a log of this information as a security measure to flag suspicious logins from unknown devices or locations, similar to how banks ship a fraud alert when your credit card number is used in a suspicious location. This exercise seemed reasonable, and so I didn't try to purge this information.
But what bothered me was the data that I had explicitly deleted simply that lingered in plain sight. On my friends listing, Facebook had a record of "Removed Friends," a dossier of the 112 people I had removed forth with the date I clicked the "Unfriend" push. Why should Facebook call back the people I've cutting off from my life?
Facebook's explanation was dissatisfying. The company said information technology might use my list of deleted friends so that those people did not appear in my feed with the characteristic "On This Day," which resurfaces memories from years past to assistance people reminisce. I'd rather have the option to delete the list of deleted friends for proficient.
Epitome 
The Ad Industry Has Eyes Everywhere
What Facebook retained about me isn't remotely every bit creepy as the sheer number of advertisers that have my information in their databases. I found this out when I clicked on the Ads section in my Facebook file, which loaded a history of the dozen ads I had clicked on while browsing the social network.
Lower downwards, there was a section titled "Advertisers with your contact info," followed by a list of roughly 500 brands, the overwhelming majority of which I had never interacted with. Some brands sounded obscure and sketchy — 1 was called "Microphone Check," which turned out to be a radio prove. Other brands were more familiar, like Victoria's Hole-and-corner Pinkish, Proficient Eggs or AARP.
Facebook said unfamiliar advertisers might announced on the listing because they might have obtained my contact information from elsewhere, compiled it into a list of people they wanted to target and uploaded that list into Facebook. Brands can upload their customer lists into a tool called Custom Audiences, which helps them detect those same people's Facebook profiles to serve them ads.
Brands tin obtain your information in many different ways. Those include:
■ Ownership information from a data provider similar Acxiom, which has amassed one of the world's largest commercial databases on consumers. Brands tin can buy unlike types of client data sets from a provider, like contact information for people who belong to a certain demographic, and take that information to Facebook to serve targeted ads, said Michael Priem, master executive of Modernistic Bear on, an advertisement house in Minneapolis.
Last month, Facebook announced that it was limiting its practice of allowing advertisers to target ads using information from tertiary-party data brokers like Acxiom.
■ Using tracking technologies like spider web cookies and invisible pixels that load in your web browser to collect information about your browsing activities. There are many dissimilar trackers on the web, and Facebook offers 10 different trackers to help brands harvest your data, according to Ghostery, which offers privacy tools that cake ads and trackers. The advertisers tin accept some pieces of data that they have collected with trackers and upload them into the Custom Audiences tool to serve ads to you on Facebook.
■ Getting your data in simpler means, besides. Someone you shared information with could share it with another entity. Your credit bill of fare loyalty program, for instance, could share your data with a hotel chain, and that hotel concatenation could serve you ads on Facebook.
The upshot? Even a Facebook lurker, similar myself, who has barely clicked on any digital ads can have personal data exposed to an enormous number of advertisers. This was non entirely surprising, just seeing the list of unfamiliar brands with my contact information in my Facebook file was a dose of reality.
I tried to contact some of these advertisers, like Very Important Puppets, a toymaker, to ask them well-nigh what they did with my data. They did not answer.
What About Google?
Let's be clear: Facebook is merely the tip of the iceberg when information technology comes to what data tech companies accept collected on me.
Knowing this, I also downloaded copies of my Google information with a tool called Google Takeout. The data sets were exponentially larger than my Facebook data. For my personal email account alone, Google'south archive of my data measured eight gigabytes, enough to concord nigh two,000 hours of music. By comparison, my Facebook data was about 650 megabytes, the equivalent of about 160 hours of music.
Here was the biggest surprise in what Google collected on me: In a folder labeled Ads, Google kept a history of many news articles I had read, like a Newsweek story about Apple employees walking into glass walls and a New York Times story about the editor of our Modern Dear column. I didn't click on ads for either of these stories, but the search giant logged them considering the sites had loaded ads served past Google.
In some other binder, labeled Android, Google had a record of apps I had opened on an Android phone since 2015, forth with the date and time. This felt like an extraordinary level of detail.
Google did non immediately respond to a request for comment.
On a brighter note, I downloaded an annal of my LinkedIn data. The data set was less than half a megabyte and contained exactly what I had expected: spreadsheets of my LinkedIn contacts and information I had added to my contour.
Yet that offered little solace. Be warned: In one case you come across the vast amount of data that has been nerveless about you, you won't exist able to unsee it.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/technology/personaltech/i-downloaded-the-information-that-facebook-has-on-me-yikes.html
0 Response to "Yikes Let s Try Tat One Again"
Post a Comment