The recent Facebook outage on the 4th of October showed how many people rely on Facebook’s applications. However, what most Facebook users dismiss is the fact that they need you more than you need Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has built an empire our his original idea of Facebook and now owns businesses ranging from Instagram to WhatsApp. While these companies are trying to mask their business practices as innocent social networks, they have built their applications around collecting your data. While it isn’t a secret that Facebook does this, the extent to which your data is collected and handled might shock many users.
So what information does Facebook collect about you? To begin with, they accumulate data including all (audio) messages and files you have ever sent or received. Furthermore, they have access to your phone’s complete contacts list. Additionally, every time you log in, they collect data ranging from the time, location, and type of device used. Finally, they have access to your webcam and microphone (The Gardian, 2018). Facebook’s algorithm can filter this information and provide companies who seek to advertise on Facebook with extremely specific information. However, these companies are strictly prohibited to display this information to the public.
In an attempt to educate Facebook users about these practices, competing messaging app Signal launched a campaign showing how your information is used in advertising. They created multi-variant targeted ads, all beginning with “You got this ad because you’re”. These ads display a portion of the data Facebook collected which was available to use by advertisers. As seen in the examples below, Facebook can create a detailed user profile based on the viewer’s accumulated data. This profile may include your profession, relationship status, location, interests, and even possible health conditions. However, when Signal planned to educate the viewer about this information, Facebook banned their advertisement account (Signal, 2021). What became apparent after Signal’s campaign is that Facebook will not allow advertisers to use their created user profiles for anything besides advertising.
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal occurred in 2015, linking Facebook to a massive data breach, Facebook finally decided to change their privacy policy in 2018. This change focused on making it easier for users to find and use their privacy settings, in addition to improving the overall transparency of their data collection. Facebook gave its users improved access and insights into their collected data and provided the option to remove accumulated information. However, by undermining Signal’s attempt to provide users with a structured insight into their collected data, Facebook exposed itself by showing that they do not endorse their so-called transparency improvements and prefer to keep it complicated to comprehend. So, while we all got a taste of life without Facebook’s applications for 5 hours, Facebook was desperately trying to start collecting your data again.
Interested in how your own collected Facebook data? Follow the following steps:
- Click the downward arrow in the top right corner of Facebook.
- Select Settings & Privacy, then click Settings.
- In the left column, click Your Facebook information.
- Next to Download your information, click View.
References:
https://signal.org/blog/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see/
Thank you for the article, it reminds us how social media giants, such as Facebook really works. I totally agree with the thesis that Facebook is not fully transparent – perhaps because if it were crystal clear, a lot of user would remove their accounts realizing how significant amount of data Facecook collects about each of us. Why I think is it really dangeorus? Because we don’t easily control our data privacy and we don’t know to whom Facebook is selling our data.
I followed the short intstruction provided in the article. I wasn’t really suprisied how long the list of the data categories Facebook collects is. The file containing my data from the previous week only weighs 15 mb and took 5 minutes to create. That’s impressive.
Hey Thom, thanks for sharing your article. I fully agree with you that Facebook is not transparent, I dont think they have ever been nor will they become transparent. For so many years, all the users were in the dark about how tech firms are profiting from invading users data and privacy. As we are all daily users of these platforms it is hard to think of a different reality because we are so dependent on them. What do you believe are the steps forward? How can we resolve this? Also thanks for sharing how to access the data from Facebook, its quiet unbelievable the vast amount of data that gets store and sold, considering Facebook has over 3.5 billion users across all its platforms.
Very interesting article on an extremely interesting topic that people become more and more aware of. I believe that Facebook is looking for a way to comply with social pressure on the company by pretending to be transparant. However, it is in their interest to make it as difficult as possible for users to control the data collected from them. If Facebook would make it truly easily and understandable for users to control this data, people might stop allowing Facebook to collect all that data. In this case, advertisements will become much less accurate and therefore much less valuable to advertizers.