Turning Off Facebook Location Tracking Doesn't Stop It From Tracking Your Location (gizmodo.com)

Even if you explicitly tell Facebook to not track your location, it says it will still use your IP address to track your location. Kashmir Hill, reporting for Gizmodo: Aleksandra Korolova has turned off Facebook's access to her location in every way that she can. She has turned off location history in the Facebook app and told her iPhone that she "Never" wants the app to get her location. She doesn't "check-in" to places and doesn't list her current city on her profile.

Despite all this, she constantly sees location-based ads on Facebook. She sees ads targeted at "people who live near Santa Monica" (where she lives) and at "people who live or were recently near Los Angeles" (where she works as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California). When she traveled to Glacier National Park, she saw an ad for activities in Montana, and when she went on a work trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, she saw an ad for a ceramics school there. Facebook was continuing to track Korolova's location for ads despite her signaling in all the ways that she could that she didn't want Facebook doing that.

[...] "There is no way for people to opt out of using location for ads entirely," said a Facebook spokesperson by email. "We use city and zip level location which we collect from IP addresses and other information such as check-ins and current city from your profile to ensure we are providing people with a good service -- from ensuring they see Facebook in the right language, to making sure that they are shown nearby events and ads for businesses that are local to them."

Comments

each new revelation is increasingly depraved

[Thud457]

I am disgusted by your half-measures and find them to be ideologically impure.
The obvious only response to "There is no way for people to opt out of using location for ads" is DON'T USE FACEBOOK.


The only useful purpose Facebook serves is a list for the great telephone sanitizer purge.

/s on this whole post because good god, look at what we have been reduced to

Re: each new revelation is increasingly depraved

[PraiseBob]

Do advertisers have an inherent right to know the location of the device I am using (and by extension, me), when I specifically want to keep that information private?

Putting ads on billboards, or tv networks may be annoying, but targeted ads are:
* collecting information about me against my will, even when I use numerous methods to try to block them
* using that information to attempt to manipulate my behavior

Good and evil are relative terms, but I consider the majority of the industry to be outright "evil".

Really, rape?

[mevets]

One day, with a lot of luck, you will have a partner who can help explain to you the difference between trivia ( oh no, google thinks it knows where I am ) and a sadistic assault.

Re:You deserve what you get...

[bobbied]

...if you are using Facebook

LOL.. I get what I expect... But I use Facebook sparingly and don't freely share many accurate details of my personal life, mainly because I understand the risks of doing this. But then again, I'm not some naive youngster who was raised with a need for a social network online as I know how to talk to people face to face.

Read the EULIA and Terms of Service people... Think seriously about what they are saying they CAN do with any information they scrape up from you. Then remember that once they have the data, you cannot get it back or guarantee it's erased, regardless of what they promise.

Re:We don't know everything Facebook is doing.

[Trailer Trash]

"News" without an editor is a social problem that existed far less before the Internet became available because it was too expensive to distribute fake news.

The laughter that you're hearing is Dan Rather...