6 private links
Personal details from your Internet profile—from your professional history to how many friends you have—are being collected, analyzed, and sold.
If you are a Facebook user, unless you have actively opted out of the Nielsen tracking, Nielsen can track your clicks and views for its online measurement research. Nielsen/Facebook have already been tracking online advertising that people see, beginning in 2009/2010. Going forward, the Facebook/Nielsen tracking will also measure your TV viewing on mobiles and tablets. The Nielsen/Facebook tracking occurs while you are logged in to Facebook.
Update: someone pointed out that PayPal actually reveals the last four digits of the phone numbers, so this technique may work for large countries as well if the target has its phone linked to its PayPal account.
Last month, I discovered it is relatively simple to reveal private phone numbers on Facebook, uncovering some phone numbers of Belgian celebs and politicians. Even though this trick only seems to work in small countries such as Belgium (+/- 11.2 million people), a significant number of people is affected by this simple, yet effective privacy leak.
The CNIL said WhatsApp did not have the legal basis to share user data with Facebook and had violated its obligation to cooperate with the French authority.
WhatsApp, bought by Facebook in 2014, said it would begin sharing some user data with the social media group in 2016, drawing warnings from European privacy watchdogs about getting the appropriate consent.
In October, European Union privacy regulators criticized WhatsApp for not resolving their concerns over the messaging service’s sharing of user data with Facebook a year after they first issued a warning.
The French regulator said WhatsApp had not properly obtained users’ consent to begin sharing their phone numbers with Facebook for “business intelligence” purposes.
“The only way to refuse the data transfer for “business intelligence” purpose is to uninstall the application,” the CNIL said in a statement.
[...]
The CNIL said it had repeatedly asked WhatsApp to provide a sample of French users’ data transferred to Facebook but the company had explained it could not do so as it is located in the United States and “it considers that it is only subject to the legislation of this country.”
It is the most comprehensive such study ever conducted: more than 144 million page loads were examined during the analysis. The research covered more than 12 countries, including the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
The study found that at least one tracker was prowling around 77.4 percent of the tested page loads. With the help of cookie or fingerprinting processes, these trackers tag along as users surf the Web, carefully recording their every move. In the most benign cases, this information is used only for statistical and advertising purposes. As a rule, a number of third-party tracking scripts hang out on popular websites, and they hitch a ride with users as they pass through domains. Ten or more trackers that amass personal data were found on 21.3 percent of the sites(unique domains) analyzed in the study.
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The study also identified the most widely used trackers online. Google and Facebook stood out in particular, here. Google ranks in the top ten of the most widely used trackers based on page loads with five services. Facebook has three. Google Analytics was found on nearly half of all loaded pages (46.4 percent). Facebook Connect was on more than a fifth (21.9 percent).
Facebook tracks everything you type even if you DON'T post the update or comment | Daily Mail Online
Have you ever written a comment, or Facebook status, before deciding not to post it? According to new Facebook research, 70 per cent of us do this regularly.
The study found that men are more likely to 'self-censor' their social network posts, compared to women, and this is especially the case if they have a lot of male friends.
More surprising, however, is the reason why the site knows this information - because it can track what you type, even if you never post it.
Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections.
An executive was responding to a tweet asking about ads which seem to be linked to real-life conversations.
Facebook knows what millions of people do on their phones, even if they don’t actually use the social network, a new report claims.
The company is claimed to have been using data gathered from another firm for detailed insights on people’s app and website usage habits, such as which apps they use, how frequently they use them and even how long they use them for.
This information has also been used to shape Facebook’s product roadmap, and led to it buying WhatsApp and continuing to rip Snapchat’s Stories feature.
Try these 4 advanced facebook ad strategies to target people (not cookies) and reach the exact target audience you want.
After being an early adopter of Facebook and using it for over a decade, I decided to delete my account. Here’s why.
The book "Chaos Monkeys"[1], while irritating in many ways, has a detailed description of how Facebook correlates its own advertising data with information from data brokers (such as credit card transaction aggregators). This kind of stuff has been happening for quite some time. (As an extra bonus, the book describes how the author's ad-tech startup got into YC and was bought by Twitter.)