Thousands Of Companies Monitor Every Facebook User, Study Finds
By Movieguide® Contributor
A new report finds that thousands of companies monitor each Facebook user’s data.
“The average participant in our study was identified in the data by 2,230 different companies,” Consumer Reports stated. “Some were identified by more than 7,000 companies.”
The report found that 186,000 companies were tied to the data of 709 participants and that each of those companies, on average, shared the data of eight study participants.
Those companies include familiar names like Home Depot, Walmart, Macy’s, Amazon, Etsy and PayPal.
Since the group of study participants was self-selected, Consumer Report made it clear that the study does not “make any claims about how representative this sample is of the U.S. population as a whole” but did point out that their report is a rare look at how Facebook collects data.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, defended their practices, with spokesperson Emil Vazquez saying, “We offer a number of transparency tools to help people understand the information that businesses choose to share with us, and manage how it’s used.”
Meta has been making more moves to provide transparency as it faces criticism from users for selling their data. One of these moves was providing a new transparency product, the Meta Content Library, to researchers.
“Academic researchers have long been calling for better access to data from social media platforms, including Meta,” the MIT Technology Review wrote. “This new library is a step toward increased visibility about what is happening on its platforms and the effect that Meta’s products have on online conversations, politics, and society at large.”
Movieguide® previously reported on the different ways Meta is tracking users’ data:
Meta recently released a new feature that allows the tech giant to track its users more easily.
The Link History feature stores a list of websites visited on the Facebook Mobile Browser within the last 30 days.
Per Fox News, “Meta’s Link History setting collects the links you’ve clicked on within the Facebook app. This is limited to links you accessed within Facebook’s browser, which automatically pops up when you click on a link within the Facebook app. You can then view all the links you’ve clicked on and then revisit those links, which will reopen in Facebook’s browser.”
While Meta rolled out this feature for convenience, users realize that it is just another way the company can track their information.
PCMag noted, “Meta doesn’t just have access to your activity when you use Facebook and Instagram. It also knows what you do when you navigate away from its social apps and websites.”
“Meta makes billions of dollars off data collection. [Link History] is just a more transparent way for the company to tell its users it’s actively tracking the links they use. Meta has been actively pushing more information about how its platforms work, how it’s tracking you, and how it’s using your information. But there are still questions on if Meta is giving users the full picture,” Fox News reported.
- Content: +4Share:
- Content: +1