Facebook has long let users see all sorts of things the site knows about them, like whether they enjoy football, have recently moved houses or like Donald Trump.
But Facebook gives users little indication that it buys far more sensitive data about them, including their income, the types of restaurants they visit frequently and even how many credit cards a person has.
ProPublica has been encouraging Facebook users to share the categories of interest that the site has assigned to them.
Facebook’s site says it gets information about its users “from a few different sources.”
As an ongoing investigation by ProPublica has shown, Facebook is going beyond the tacit agreement that it provides a free service in exchange for online personal information.
“They are not being honest,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “Facebook is bundling a dozen different data companies to target an individual customer, and an individual should have access to that bundle as well.”
“Our approach to controls for third-party categories is somewhat different than our approach for Facebook-specific categories,” said Steve Satterfield, a Facebook manager of privacy and public policy. “This is because the data providers we work with generally make their categories available across many different ad platforms, not just on Facebook.”
Satterfield said users who don’t want that information to be available to Facebook should contact the data brokers. He said users can visit a page in Facebook’s help center, which provides links to the opt-outs for six data brokers that sell personal data to Facebook.
Users can ask data brokers to show them the information stored about them.
Featured Image: MIT
