Does Facebook Know You Without Having a Facebook Account
One of the creepiest things brought to calorie-free during Mark Zuckerberg's testimony on Capitol Colina this week was how Facebook can amass data to construct what are being referred to as "shadow profiles" of yous, even if you lot've never opted in or joined the world's largest social network.
Facebook's CEO told Congressman Ben Lujan, D-N.Thou., that he was unfamiliar with shadow profiles as a term but acknowledged that "in full general," Facebook collects information on people who have not signed up for the service, which information technology does for "security purposes."
But privacy advocates worry about what happens to that data when it is in Facebook'due south command and not yours, or for that matter slips out of the company'due south grasp. Facebook may have privacy tools and policies that members of the Facebook community can opt in or out of (bold they can understand them), but information technology's a whole different deal if y'all're not on a social network that is getting the skinny on you anyway.
What do they know?
1 of the principal ways the social network can get together details on someone who hasn't signed up occurs when someone you know who is on Facebook shares his or her phone contact listing with the service, which they're encouraged to exercise so that they can more than easily find their friends. At the very to the lowest degree Facebook may discover your address, telephone number and email this way, and, obviously also knows that you lot know the friend who revealed the contact list.
Your friends may also tag you lot in photos and, wittingly or not, spill the beans on other details you might otherwise wish to keep private.
A second way information typically is leaked to Facebook is through the websites you lot drib in on.
Facebook's online help center points to the fact that if you're logged out or don't accept a Facebook account and visit a website with a "Like" push or other social plug-in, your browser may send Facebook "a limited set of info. Because you lot're not logged into Facebook, you'll take fewer cookies (pocket-sized data files) than someone who'southward logged in. Like other sites on the Internet, we receive info about the spider web page you're visiting, the appointment and fourth dimension and other browser-related info. We record this info to assistance u.s.a. meliorate our products."
During his testimony, Zuckerberg mentioned another of the reasons for collecting information on Facebook members who have logged out: to prevent the practice of "scraping." That's where someone may extract information from user profiles, often through a "contrary search" with a phone number or email address they already have.
Though Facebook said this search feature could exist useful in helping you find some people — perhaps a person with a common name shared past many others — the company also acknowledged abuse by "malicious actors" and recently disabled the contrary look-up characteristic.
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Daniel Kahn Gillmor, a senior staff technologist at the American Ceremonious Liberties Matrimony, says Facebook may be using the data it collects from people not on the service for reasons it considers totally benign. And it may not apply the information at all. Just the proposition is also that Facebook may not be great at protecting your information — a concern amplified by the social network's disclosure that 87 meg Facebook users' data was improperly shared with political targeting house Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook's sheer size and reach across international borders only heightens the potential risk, even for those who have steered clear of the service.
Some websites may likewise use an analytics tool chosen the Facebook Pixel, which tin track activity when y'all're logged off. Facebook explains it this way: "When someone visits your website and takes an action (such as completing a purchase), the Facebook Pixel is triggered and reports this activity. This style, you'll ... be able to attain that client again through futurity Facebook ads."
If you lot're not a Facebook user, you may nonetheless get an ad from Facebook urging y'all to sign upwards for the service.
Facebook also makes available tools to businesses to monitor offline transactions in concrete stores or elsewhere.
Using a technical Web tool, Gillmor recently performed a five-minute browsing test by visiting various sites — but not Facebook. He discovered that data subsequently sent to Facebook included information about which news articles he read during this browsing session, his dietary preferences and his hobbies.
Of course, the ability to trace your browsing behavior across the Internet is not unique to Facebook.
What can you lot do?
Then what steps tin can you take to protect what may exist left of your privacy? Information technology may be impractical (if not downright impossible) to notify each of your friends and acquaintances to avoid sharing their contact lists with Facebook, only spread the word to them anyhow. And warn them to be careful about sharing information that involves other people.
Heed the advice yourself if you are on Facebook. Respect the privacy of friends even if you lot're less concerned about your own. Do you really have to tag their motion picture?
"It's a collective action problem in the same style that pollution is a collective action problem," Gillmor says. "In that location is some kind of weakest link failures here."
He too recommends choosing tools that minimize the leakage: the more privacy-oriented Tor Web browser, for example, or by installing thirty party plug-ins such equally RequestPolicy Contributed or uMatrix that promise to bolster privacy on the Firefox or Chrome browsers.
Unfortunately, these aren't very friendly solutions for the vast bulk of non-technical users. And even agreement how Facebook tracks not-users gets very complicated, very quickly.
"The tracking of users (and non-users) by Facebook is extremely complex, (and) in that location is still a lot that is non known," says Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Facebook insists it doesn't share your personal identity with advertisers and plans to farther analyze and elaborate on the ways information technology uses information.
In the meantime, during her own interrogation of Zuckerberg this week, Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., says the government should human activity considering "current laws have non evolved, and Congress has not adopted laws to address digital surveillance."
Rotenberg agrees: "Concerns about privacy are not the reason to not utilize Facebook. Information technology should be the reason to prepare Facebook."
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter
Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/baig/2018/04/13/how-facebook-can-have-your-data-even-if-youre-not-facebook/512674002/
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