Yahoo Finance How to find out which companies gave Facebook your data
As accusations and recriminations fly against Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook empire, users are finally waking up to just how much money the social network make out of them.
While it may have come as a surprise to some, most people will have known advertisers are keen to exploit – for a fee – what interests them as shown through their Facebook news feed.
What isn’t as well known, however, is just how many companies, big and small, provide information about you the other way.
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Aviv Ovadya, chief technologist at the Center for Social Media Responsibility in San Francisco, has posted a way for Facebook users to discover which companies are sharing your information with the site.
He’s posted a simple five-step guide on Twitter to show users how to find out.
Want to see a list of all the advertisers providing FB with data about you?
1) Go to https://t.co/8EKAvsgDif
2) Click “Advertisers you’ve interacted with”
3) On Chrome, enter this into developer console: while(true) $x(‘//*[text()=”See More”]’)[1].click();
4) ???
5) FB profit!— Aviv Ovadya (@metaviv) April 11, 2018
Ovadya – who warned in 2016 that an era of “fake news” was about to explode as tech companies rewarded click-based revenue over information accuracy and quality – said he found out that more than 300 companies had shared his data with Facebook.
MORE: Zuckerberg says you control your Facebook info — but it’s much more complicated than he says
And, in response to his post, professor David Carroll, of Parsons School of Design in New York, said people would most likely find the names of a number of politicians on their lists.
He tweeted: “Their campaigns probably uploaded their voter files to target you by name. Facebook encourages campaigns to do this. This might help explain why lawmakers don’t want to talk about it.”
You can’t opt out of having your data being uploaded to Custom Audiences. When #Zuckerberg says you have controls he’s leaving out that fact. Look at all these advertisers that have uploaded my data to Facebook. This is insanity. pic.twitter.com/cIMZ34UF8j
— David Carroll (@profcarroll) April 11, 2018
Carroll is suing political polling firm Cambridge Analytica to find out just what data it has on him.
The whole Facebook scandal blew up as Zuckerberg revealed some 87 million people had had their data “scraped” by the firm.
MORE: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is quitting Facebook over data scandal
He also discovered more than 300 advertisers had shared his data with Facebook.
Zuckerberg this week endured two days of questioning by US politicians as he tried to convince them he was still the right man to lead Facebook and that further regulation of the social media landscape was not necessary to safeguard privacy.
