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Facebook Buys Data From Third-Party Brokers To Fill In User Profiles (ibtimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from International Business Times: According to a report from ProPublica, the world's largest social network knows far more about its users than just what they do online. What Facebook can't glean from a user's activity, it's getting from third-party data brokers. ProPublica found the social network is purchasing additional information including personal income, where a person eats out and how many credit cards they keep. That data all comes separate from the unique identifiers that Facebook generates for its users based on interests and online behavior. A separate investigation by ProPublica in which the publication asked users to report categories of interest Facebook assigned to them generated more than 52,000 attributes. The data Facebook pays for from other brokers to round out user profiles isn't disclosed by the company beyond a note that it gets information "from a few different sources." Those sources, according to ProPublica, come from commercial data brokers who have access to information about people that isn't linked directly to online behavior. The social network doesn't disclose those sources because the information isn't collected by Facebook and is publicly available. Facebook does provide a page in its help center that details how to get removed from the lists held by third-party data brokers. However, the process isn't particularly easy. In the case of the Oracle-owned Datalogix, users who want off the list have to send a written request and a copy of a government-issued identification in the mail to Oracle's chief privacy officer. Another data collecting service, Acxiom, requires users provide the last four digits of their social security number to see the information the company has gathered about them.
Worse than that is, even if you don't have an account, FB already has one for you, just waiting to be activated. Because your friends, family, and private databases sold you out.
Fuck the Zuck.
Your friends have apps with access to their contacts among a multitude of other permissions. They Sold you out long ago
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Your friends have cell phones.
Cell phones have apps.
Apps may have access to your contacts.
You are a contact.
Sold out.
Oh it goes FAR deeper then that. Many of these companies know a lot more about you than even YOU know about you. Forget browser fingerprinting. Forget tracking. Every piece of information you give away to every advertiser or company allows them to individually put together pieces of information about you. What you don't realize is that even if you use incognito mode all the time, change your user agent, etc. they can track your HABITS. They can track your LOCATION via the IP address you use to visit. They can even track you based on on the type of porn you look at. This information might not be worth much by itself, but it all gets fed into a system that grades it on it's quality and uses the results to identify you, profile you, and then find you (I say 'a system', but there are several competing products out there) and sell personalized products/services to you or worse. Even if you use a VPN 24/7/365 someone likely has a handle on you. It might not be a good one at first, but they will build a profile, and combine it with other data/profiles...and eventually they'll be able to tie it all together. You might think that staying off the internet can help you, but at this point, the world has become so connected that anyone can be found and identified. Have a drivers license? You are on the radar. Get a ticket/go to court/sue anyone/get sued? On the radar. Use a credit/debit card or checking account/ACH? DEFINITELY on the radar (even if your bank has a decent privacy policy, Your transaction crosses several different boundaries, so it's impossible to guarantee your privacy when doing a financial transaction of any kind except MAYBE cash...and even then...)
I assure you, blocking the ads doesn't change the data collection aspect of most adservers. Disabled javascript (80%) and image loading (19%), you eliminate most of the tracking....excepting your cellphone. Nothing stops collection on that device. Having worked on a host of adservers, I'm surprised at how the biggest problems are scaling and manipulating large data, not the complexity of gathering data.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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