2024-01-18 19:11:19
48,000 companies sent Facebook data about a single person, data security here and there.
A A study by Consumer Reports showed that thousands of companies contribute to Facebook storing data about each individual. Facebook obtains data about individual users from many thousands of companies. A new study from Consumer Reports (PDF) now tried to provide more precise figures about the phenomenon.
Facebook data security vs money from ads
The researchers found that Facebook received data from an average of 2,230 different companies for each of the 709 volunteer users. An extreme example showed that
“almost 48,000 data from different companies were found related to a single volunteer”
In total, Facebook’s data archives showed that 186,892 companies provided data on all study participants.
Volunteers recruited using The Markup had their personal information extracted from Facebook using the Download Your Information tool and shared with the researchers.
The infographic above shows how a person gives information to their apps, then to servers, and finally to Facebook, which uses the data to target ads tailored to users.
Data brokers help companies
Companies using Meta’s platform upload customers’ personal data and shopping habits, which Meta uses to show targeted ads to them or to people with a similar profile. The researchers believed that simple micro-targeting of campaigns to specific user data was responsible for the fact that tens of thousands of listed companies targeted only one volunteer.
The infographic above shows how businesses work with data brokers who aggregate users’ personal data from multiple sources – before handing it over to Facebook for ad targeting.
96 percent of the study participants’ archives contained information shared by a data broker called LiveRamp, but it did not contain all data. Large retailers such as The Home Depot, Walmart or Amazon also appeared among the data providers, while other smaller businesses were “surprisingly well” represented on the data market. For example, one car dealership in a Texas town of 24,665 covered 10 percent of the data provided on the study volunteers.
However, most could not be identified as they used nonsensical combinations of characters such as ‘Bm 5 100tkqc nlm’ or generic names such as ‘Viking’. But the name doesn’t really matter. According to Acxiom, which owns LiveRamp, it can reach more than 2.5 billion marketable consumers worldwide. They pride themselves on being able to create a perfect picture of the consumer in order to learn about better consumer decisions.
We’ve all heard someone say that our smartphones are watching us. That way, many people will surely know what kind of ads we should display.
The truth is, companies don’t just sit back and wait for us to talk about jeans. They already know in advance that we want to buy jeans, what size we wear, which brands we like, and approximately what season of the year we will buy them.
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#companies #Facebook #data #single #person