2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44
The social network collects information about you in more sophisticated ways than one could imagine.
Researchers at Princeton University and Northeastern Boston University found that Facebook provides access to user phone numbers for targeted advertising. Moreover, even those numbers that are not indicated in the profile are included in the mailing lists.
Northeastern University professor Alan Mislove and Gizmodo editor Kashmir Hill is a simple experiment. Hill created an ad with Mislov's phone number. After a while, he saw an ad on his Facebook feed. According to Mislov, Hill’s advertisements stuck in front of his eyes for several hours. However, he did not indicate his phone number on his Facebook profile.
Alan Mislov
Many people don't understand how Facebook targeted advertising works. Advertisers can specify exactly which users should see their ad. They just need to enter email addresses, phone numbers, names, or just the dates of birth of representatives of the target audience, and Facebook will independently find suitable users.
Facebook has a special one for advertisers called Custom Audiences. It allows you to show ads to specific people by uploading a list of their phone numbers or email. Research by Mislov and his colleagues confirmed that the list also includes those numbers that users made hidden or did not indicate at all in the profile. Facebook takes for targeting ads and numbers from your contacts on your smartphone, and even your number specified for two-factor authentication, which, in theory, should not be shown to anyone.
To test their theory, the researchers created another advertising mailing list, this time indicating several hundred phone numbers belonging to students and staff at Northeastern University. Most of them saw her ad, although they did not include their numbers in their profiles.
So how does it work?
When you install the Facebook app on your smartphone, it accesses your contacts. So all the names, phone numbers and email addresses of your friends are at his disposal.
This is necessary so that the social network can recommend friends to you. In addition, this information is used to target advertisements.
People's numbers and names are automatically associated by Facebook with their social media profiles. So, even if you did not link the number to your page, the social network will learn it from your friends without asking permission. And if that number ends up in the advertiser's database, the advertiser will be able to show you ads through your Facebook profile.
And that's not the only trick the social network uses to serve ads. So, Oscar Schwartz of The Outline, the Facebook mobile app literally listens to what you say next to your phone to see which ads will be most relevant to you.
In a comment to the Gizmodo portal, the Facebook press service admitted that it really processes users' phone numbers without their knowledge, but it does it exclusively with good intentions - to make advertising recommendations more accurate. If you are not satisfied with such a free treatment of your data, you should think about deleting your page, or at least making the social network collect less information about you.
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