At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Gennie Gebhart and Jamie Williams explain why Facebook doesn’t need to listen in on your microphone to serve you with creepy ads:
In ten total hours of testimony in front of the Senate and the House this week, Mark Zuckerberg was able to produce only one seemingly straightforward, privacy-protective answer. When Sen. Gary Peters asked Zuckerberg if Facebook listens to users through their cell phone microphones in order to collect information with which to serve them ads, Zuckerberg confidently said, “No.”
What he left out, however, is that Facebook doesn’t listen to users through their phone microphones because it doesn’t have to. Facebook actually uses even more invasive, invisible surveillance and analysis methods, which give it enough information about you to produce uncanny advertisements all the same.
This was what finally got Elizabeth to close her Facebook account: very shortly after posting a status update that referenced a particular business (that’s been gone for decades), she started getting ads for modern equivalents outside her Facebook session. Clearly, her advertising profile had been updated to include her “new” interest, and the ads were now tailored to this sudden change of tastes.
But how does Facebook know to serve you an ad for a specific product right after you talk about it? What explains seeing ads for things you have never searched for or communicated about online? The list is long. Instead of listening to your conversations through your phone, Facebook:
- tracks you through Like buttons across the web, whether or not you are logged in or even have a Facebook account.
- maintains shadow profiles on people who don’t use Facebook.
- logs Android users’ calls and texts.
- absorbs unique phone identifiers through in-app advertising to associate your identity across the different devices you use.
- tracks your location and serves ads based on where you are, where you live, and where you work.
- tracks your in-store purchases to link the ads you see online with the purchases you make offline.
- watches the things you start writing but don’t post to track your self-censorship.
- linked purchases to Messenger accounts to allow sellers to send confirmation messages without affirmative user permission.
- bought and advertised a VPN to track what users are doing on other apps and crush competition.
- manipulated your Newsfeed to see if it can make you sad or happy.
- files patents for emerging tracking technology, like tracking your location through the dust on your phone camera, for potential future use.
Tracking and analysis methods like these power not only those too on-the-nose ads, but also invasive “People You May Know” recommendations.
Users are onto this. If you have ever been creeped out by an ad for a product popping up right after you were talking out loud about it, your fear and even paranoia are warranted — just not for the exact reasons you might think. No matter how Facebook achieves its frighteningly accurate ads and suggestions, the end result is the same: an uncomfortable, privacy-invasive user experience.
I’m getting closer to the point of pulling the plug on my Facebook account as well … it seems like every week or so I need to go spelunking in the privacy settings to shut off yet another way they want to monetize my information or invade my privacy even more. Several of my FB friends are dabbling with MeWe.com as an alternative and they do claim not to track you or otherwise compromise your privacy.
