Advertisers Who Uploaded a Contact List With Your Infor
O due north one of Facebook'south myriad setting screens, a place where few dare tread, is a list of places you've probably never heard of, all of whom insist that they know you. It's emblematic of the data protection problems Facebook is struggling to address in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, of the fact that these issues spread far beyond Facebook, and of the easy solutions the company could take if only it had the backbone.
This list is the drove of "advertisers you've interacted with". You can find it halfway down your ad preferences screen, below a list of algorithmically suggested topics that Facebook thinks you're interested in (if you lot're a heavy user, these may be scarily accurate; if y'all're non, they'll probable be hilariously off).
A layperson may recall the list of advertisers you've interacted with contains… advertisers you've interacted with. And some sub-sections do. The tab "whose website or app you've used" is cocky-explanatory – if you've logged in to a website or app through Facebook, well, that company knows who you are and can now advertise to you. The same is true if you visit a website that has Facebook's tracking pixel on information technology (the "who y'all've visited" list) or, nigh obviously, if you've already clicked on an ad before ("whose ads you lot've clicked").
Only the largest list is titled "who have added their contact list to Facebook". And for me information technology's a long listing of companies you take never done business organization with, interacted with – or fifty-fifty knew existed.
My listing – on a placeholder Facebook account with no friends, created using an email address I don't hand out for mailing lists – contained well-nigh 200 advertisers, including an Italian eating house in Perth, Australia; a waffle shop in Charlottenburg, Germany; and a surf cafe in Dubai.
Facebook's explanation for the list is simple plenty: "These advertisers are running ads using a contact list they uploaded that includes your contact information," the visitor tells users. "This data was nerveless by the advertiser, probable later you lot shared your e-mail address with them or another business they've partnered with."
Advertisers are non immune to but 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 confronting most nations' information protection laws, information technology is also confronting Facebook's terms of service, which require that advertisers "accept provided appropriate notice to and secured any necessary consent from the data subjects".
Yet those terms of service have not stopped just that from happening. The lure of extending your targeted advertizement just a little fleck farther is just too strong. Shady data brokers will happily sell you a list of email addresses perfectly profiled for your eatery to advertise to, and if you do not want to pay, well y'all can just spring on the dark web and download millions from one of the large dumps made public over the past decade.
That'southward non to say I am powerless. Facebook provides me with the power to opt out of advertising from those companies, just past clicking a cross in the corner. All I need to do is devote some time to clicking a pocket-size button 174 times in a row and I am free from those companies – at least until the next 174 make up one's mind to upload my information.
What I cannot practise is anything with real ability. I cannot tell Facebook that the vast majority of these companies cannot possibly take caused my email address legitimately; I cannot opt out of them all at once, defenestrating advertisers in their masses with a single click; and I certainly cannot request that no company be able to target me simply by uploading an easily guessable address to the site.
When it rolled out its new privacy policies in advance of GDPR, Facebook stood fast against some observers who believe complying with the law requires offering the selection to opt out of targeted advertising altogether. Instead, the company took a slimmed-down arroyo, allowing users to limit the kinds of data that advertisers can target with, simply insisting that targeting overall was fine.
Information technology may still be. But I'one thousand not certain many users will take a wait at the country of targeted advertisement today, as reflected on their own Facebook settings pages, and conclude that everything is working equally it should.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/21/how-firms-you-have-never-interacted-with-can-target-your-facebook