Advertisers Who Uploaded a Contact List With Your Inf
O northward i of Facebook'south myriad setting screens, a place where few cartel tread, is a list of places you've probably never heard of, all of whom insist that they know you. It's allegorical of the data protection problems Facebook is struggling to accost in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, of the fact that these problems spread far across Facebook, and of the piece of cake solutions the company could take if only information technology had the courage.
This list is the drove of "advertisers you've interacted with". Y'all can notice it halfway down your advertising preferences screen, below a list of algorithmically suggested topics that Facebook thinks you lot're interested in (if you're a heavy user, these may be scarily accurate; if y'all're non, they'll probable be hilariously off).
A layperson may remember the listing of advertisers you've interacted with contains… advertisers yous've interacted with. And some sub-sections do. The tab "whose website or app you've used" is self-explanatory – if yous've logged in to a website or app through Facebook, well, that company knows who you are and can at present advertise to you. The same is truthful if yous visit a website that has Facebook'south tracking pixel on information technology (the "who you've visited" listing) or, most plainly, if you lot've already clicked on an advertisement before ("whose ads you've clicked").
Only the largest list is titled "who accept added their contact list to Facebook". And for me it's a long listing of companies you lot take never done business organisation with, interacted with – or even knew existed.
My list – on a placeholder Facebook business relationship with no friends, created using an email address I don't mitt out for mailing lists – independent almost 200 advertisers, including an Italian restaurant in Perth, Australia; a waffle shop in Charlottenburg, Germany; and a surf cafe in Dubai.
Facebook's explanation for the list is simple enough: "These advertisers are running ads using a contact list they uploaded that includes your contact information," the company tells users. "This data was nerveless past the advertiser, likely subsequently yous shared your email accost with them or another business they've partnered with."
Advertisers are not allowed to simply purchase a list of e-mail addresses and upload them, or harvest them from the internet and sign people up to their mailing lists without consent. That is not only against almost nations' information protection laws, it is also against Facebook's terms of service, which require that advertisers "have provided advisable notice to and secured any necessary consent from the data subjects".
However those terms of service accept not stopped just that from happening. The lure of extending your targeted advertizement simply a little bit further is just besides strong. Shady data brokers will happily sell you a list of email addresses perfectly profiled for your restaurant to advertise to, and if y'all exercise non want to pay, well you can just leap on the dark web and download millions from one of the large dumps made public over the past decade.
That's non to say I am powerless. Facebook provides me with the ability to opt out of advertising from those companies, just by clicking a cross in the corner. All I need to do is devote some fourth dimension to clicking a modest button 174 times in a row and I am free from those companies – at least until the side by side 174 decide to upload my information.
What I cannot practise is anything with real power. I cannot tell Facebook that the vast majority of these companies cannot possibly have acquired my email address legitimately; I cannot opt out of them all at in one case, defenestrating advertisers in their masses with a unmarried click; and I certainly cannot request that no company be able to target me merely by uploading an easily guessable address to the site.
When it rolled out its new privacy policies in accelerate of GDPR, Facebook stood fast confronting some observers who believe complying with the law requires offering the option to opt out of targeted advertising altogether. Instead, the company took a slimmed-down approach, allowing users to limit the kinds of information that advertisers can target with, but insisting that targeting overall was fine.
It may nonetheless be. But I'm not sure many users volition take a look at the state of targeted advertising today, as reflected on their own Facebook settings pages, and conclude that everything is working as it should.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/21/how-firms-you-have-never-interacted-with-can-target-your-facebook
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