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Facebook Will Track What Physical Stores You Go Into (popsci.com)

Facebook will soon roll out a feature that will allow advertisers to see which brick and mortar stores you've physically walked into. These details are collected from anyone who has the location services feature turned on, Facebook says. The will allow advertisers to see in real time which Facebook ads are turning into actual sales. Popular Science reports: Using the location services on your phone, Facebook will keep a tally of who goes to what stores, and show the anonymized numbers to advertisers, as evidence that buying ads on Facebook is getting people to visit brick-and-mortar businesses. It's a great thing for Facebook, which will now have excellent data to prove (or disprove) on a user-to-user basis what a store is getting for its advertising dollar. But it's a pretty frightening idea that a company will have information not unlike your credit card statement all from location services data.

7 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. No it wont by TheCarp · · Score: 3, Informative

    Because I don't install special snowflake apps on my phone, and VERY VERY few of the ones I do get approved to ask for location data, and I take away any permissions I don't think they need.

    First thing I did with my new phone was disable permentantly the first app that asked for my location data. (some hidden NFL app)

    --
    "I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
  2. Re:Reasons by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Informative

    turn off Wifi as well. It can see what wifi AP's are available and use that data

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  3. Re:There are limits to GPS by geek · · Score: 4, Informative
  4. Re:There are limits to GPS by HornWumpus · · Score: 3, Informative

    GPS returns altitude.

    --
    John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
  5. Other options by emil · · Score: 3, Informative

    You may want some, or all, of these:

    • -Xprivacy, a module in the Xposed framework, can be used to deny location access to any application, including Facebook. Your phone must be rooted to install Xposed modules.
    • -Cyanogenmod PrivacyGuard has a similar feature. You must erase your OEM operating system to install Cyanogenmod.
    • -3rd-party Facebook clients:
      • -Face Slim is very current, with patches in the last few days to deal with Facebook's messenger "night of the long knives."
      • -Tinfoil is the best-known skeleton client, but has been recently silent on the messenger issue. The app currently crashes if you try to use messenger functions.
      • -Several closed-source Facebook clients can be found in the Play store, who MIGHT respect your privacy.
  6. Re:Reasons by Solandri · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you're on Android Marshmallow, you can deny these permissions on a per-app basis. So give your GPS and fitness app permission to use your location, give your camera app access to the camera, but prohibit Facebook. If your phone hasn't yet gotten Marshmallow, this is probably the biggest reason you want to pester your carrier about hurrying up and releasing that update. It's been available to developers for over a year now, and unless you've got a very old handset it's inexcusable that a carrier hasn't rolled it out yet. (In an ideal world carriers wouldn't be allowed to sell phones, so we'd have competition to force phone makers to roll out these updates promptly. Most have within a month or two, it's the carriers who are dragging their feet - because they have no competition within their network they feel no urgency to roll out these things.)

    Some apps crash if you prohibit certain permissions. But that's probably a good sign that you should uninstall that app (the developer isn't doing basic error handling). The only permission Marshmallow doesn't allow you to block is network access. But if you're rooted, it's trivial to install a firewall and block specific apps from using your data and/or wifi connection.

  7. Re:Or make it critical for social networking by Maow · · Score: 3, Informative

    We can only guess that the Facebook app on his phone (which I steadfastly refuse to install on mine) scraped my phone number from his contacts list and then Facebook somehow matched it up with my name.

    That's exactly my understanding of how it works.

    In which case, they also scraped your email address(es), home address, and who knows - SMS / email conversations? Call history?

    If this friend posted any photos at a time that FB's algorithms can place the two of you together (i.e. GPS says "current location = "rock_climbing_guy's" house +/- 100m, then they have photos of you (and the inside of your house, etc.).

    The possibilities are endless and the only consolation is that FB has so much of this data that it's possibly difficult for them to gather what they have on you specifically. However, FB has some really talented people, so they can probably analyze what they have quite well and nearly instantaneously - should their attention turn your way.