My iPhone is, literally, my baby. With every step that I take, it is with me. I never realized how much data I was sharing, until I looked through all my apps today. In Google Maps and in the Maps of iPhone, you can look through all your recently visited places. With timestamps and all. And another app that was smiling at me like a doting parent was FaceBook (okay, it was more creeping at me like a helicopter mom.) And I am pretty sure that FaceBook also knows my location about me. But how much do they know about me? Like really know?
Well… Quite a lot actually. You can actually see your own ad preferences / ad profile on Facebook based on what you liked and didn’t like, what you have hidden etc, with what kind of ads you have interacted and which of the companies might already know about you because you are one of their customers. It is kind of scary to see how much they got right, e.g. they were spot on about my love for food, and my love for cats. (Click here, if you want to check your own Ad profile on Facebook).
Every act that you do on Facebook, that helps them build a better profile for you. However, what can you conduct from all these interactions on Facebook? And what does it say about you? Well… there is Apply the magic sauce. This is an internet engine that use all these little actions what you are doing on the internet to sketch a personalized profile about you. It is a personalization engine that predicts your personality from whatever you do online. I do recommend you to check it out (and to be creeped out about it). I used the Apply the magic sauce on my Facebook profile and they were also very spot on about who I was psychologically. It also set me thinking and made me realized some things about myself that I wasn’t even aware of…
So, Facebook (and all these other apps) know so much about you, you can almost say that they know you better than yourself. However, the power that they have over you, how are they going to use it? This is such an open space with no boundaries (yet). There is almost no legislation about it, and the ease of how to abuse these information is high, also the risks.
What do you guys think? Did you try the websites out? Were you surprised about the findings? Share your thoughts with me 🙂
Hey T.Y.,
It actually goes further than just what you do within the Facebook environment. Many websites, at least when they got their online marketing on point, make use of what’s called the Facebook Pixel. With the Pixel, Facebook knows what your behavior is on a certain website.
Adding a code snippet to your website allows you and Facebook both track what a visitor does and use this data for retargeting purposes. Every (micro) conversion in the customer journey would be registered and a custom audience can be built for advertisements. Person A who looked at the latest MacBook Pro on Bol.com but did not convert would be shown targeted ads involving the MacBook Pro from Bol.com on Facebook, for example. This would be different for Person B, depending on one’s actions and behavior on Bol.com.
From a marketer’s POV, this is great! A lot of the work is automated, audience is segmented and retargeting has proven to be very effective, also leading to a much lower CPC or CPA and higher conversion rates.
Anyways, this kind of data gathered from tons of websites people visit combined with what you described in your article…imagine the possibilities.
Btw, if you want to know whether Facebook is tracking your behavior on other websites, you could use the Ghostery extension for Chrome that enables you to see what trackers, e.g. Pixel, are installed.
More about Pixel can be found here: https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-pixel/
Thanks for your reply, Fredo!
You are totally right that this is indeed heaven for marketers. And I believe it is awesome that the workload can be lessened and that marketers can use these data to craft personalized messages to the users with for example a useful product that I need, instead of general advertising that nobody is waiting for. However, where do we draw the line? The thought that Facebook is tracking my every move, even OUTSIDE the Facebook environment, that kind of scares me. Also, on another note, as Facebook can predict more and more about us, the more they can use this information to attract our attention, and to keep our eyes locked on the screen. They make money out of our attention, and they thus need to keep us attracted and almost addicted to their platform. Is it okay that they can use what they know about us (gathered from so many sources) to make us crave for that little blue box with an F? I, myself, am not so sure… (Not that it stops me from clicking on it, as I am so deeply invested in FB right now…)
Thanks for an interesting post! Indeed, I have noticed how much Facebook knows about me judging by the ads that are displayed in my newsfeed. However, I disagree with you that Facebook can properly judge our personality in addition to our preferences. I have completed the test of my Facebook profile on Apply the Magic Sause, and I disagree with the results presented there, especially with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators. I have completed MBTI assessment at my current job a month ago, and 3 out of 4 results were opposite to the ones that the online source predicted. Therefore, I believe our true character is not the same as our like-based preferences, since there are various aspects that Facebook cannot judge, such as honesty, leadership, fears, etc. Nevertheless, I agree that in the future technology will be able to correctly infer our psychological traits, leading to the emergence of emotionally-intelligent and socially-skilled machines.
Hi Yullia, thanks for your two cents.
It is interesting that you noticed such a difference in your results from the Apply the Magic Sauce, while I was shocked with my results. I believe this discrepancy only means that not all grounds are covered. Yet… And I agree that true character may not be the same as our “preferences”. However, just like how Netflix uses the aggregation of many people to get the best matched movies and TV series to you, not all of these matches will be perfect for you. I do believe that using big data, they can come eerily close to the outcomes of possible true characters. As every like that we make can come from different emotions / motivations (e.g. I like a cat picture, because I like cats or because the picture was funny.) I think that these things are what cause the discrepancies.
What do you think about the possible outcome that robots may just become as “human” as us?
Hi!
Great to read about this! I used (some of) the data that applymagicsauce uses to predict depression in my thesis. It’s really astonishing to find out what kind of predictive power these kinds of data have. On the other hand, it makes sense too. Quoting Kosinski (2014): “This work suggests that human behaviour in the online environment is driven by the same set of psychological factors as is the case in the traditional offline world.”
In the end, it’s all behavior, which reflects personality & temperament. The scary part is that you can use this kind of data for marketing purposes too. It starts with marketing your meditation app to people with anxiety problems, but ends with selling pseudoscientific self-help BS or homeopathic medicine to people who need actual psychiatric help.
That is really cool. What did you get out of your results? From another research, I read about big data and depression, they found that Twitter can accurately predict postpartum depression. Also, using big data, researched could pinpoint the possible time when someone would commit suicide. This is great news for possible prevention in my opinion, however your ‘scary’ part is indeed also the thing that worries me. And I also believe that the chance that your sketched scenario would come true is very high. Especially if you look at how, for example cigarettes were marketed towards the public in the beginning: towards A people to calm themselves. (Also another interesting fact for you might find, is that the A personality types were also realized by cigarettes companies…)
Of course I was aware that the Internet and especially social media companies like Facebook are collecting huge amounts of data from us. But when I opened the link to the Facebook advertisement section you placed in the post, I was still shocked how accurate the level of personal information was. Yes, we are to some extent in charge of determining which data we want to be collected from us, but the extent Facebook does it the only choice would be not to be a member of their platform anymore. I do believe that in the coming years, there will be a huge increase in data security laws and customers will need to give more authentications if data will be stored and used. The EU Data Protection law already provides the basis of this, however there is still much more regulations to be covered.
Yup, that surprised me, too Honestly, when I first tried it out, I thought it would be something like a BuzzFeed article / test, were the results would humor me… instead they scared me!
I believe the coming years will prove how we will end up tackling these issues. I am really curious how we will be in 5 years or so. Will we become a nation which just has accepted the Big Brother thing, because we became so depended on FaceBook, because everyone is using it? I do hope it will be another scenario, where we have the best of both worlds. However I am not sure if that will happen as it is difficult to predict how these new laws will go… especially due to the lobbying of big companies often…
Hi! Interesting post. I checked the websites and though I had expected the results to be quite precise, I hadn’t expect that Facebook would know that much about me in terms of quantity and completeness of my activities. I find it quite alarming that they collected a lot of sensitive personal data and that regulation is lacking about how to treat this sensitive data. For example, the use of this information in combination with nudging – shaping the situations of decision-making in such a way that the individual will take the ‘right’ decision with a higher probability than in an alternative landscape – will enhance firms ability to personalize product/services by focusing on your preferences as influencing your own choice. And by knowing almost everything of its consumers (personal profile, preferences and how to influence choices), the power of firms will be enormous. And thinking about this in a global context; then it’s all about power. The more influence big companies have on our behavior and know about our preferences, the less control we have over ourselves. I personally hope that regulation will be developed. And you? Do you expect to legislation to come regarding the usage of the personal data? And if so, when do you think that would be introduced; months, years or decade?