By now most internet users know their online activity is constantly tracked. No one should be shocked to see ads for items they previously searched for, or to be asked if their data can be shared with an unknown number of “partners.”
Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data.
The study was able to examine a form of tracking that is normally hidden: so-called “server-to-server” tracking, in which personal data goes from a company’s servers to Meta’s servers.
One company appeared in 96% of participants’ data: the San Francisco-based data broker LiveRamp.
“This type of tracking which occurs entirely outside of the user’s view is just so far outside of what people expect when they use the internet,” Caitriona Fitzgerald, Deputy Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told The Markup in an interview. Fitzgerald said that while users are likely aware that Meta knows what they are doing while they are on Facebook and Instagram, “they don’t expect Meta to know what stores they walk into or what news articles they’re reading or every site they visit online.”
The very sad part about this is, the data being sourced (and where it comes from) has little to nothing to do with Facebook. This is just Facebook buying data for it to create more comprehensive profiles and context about its users. It’s also pretty certain that none of these users expected this data to find its way back to Facebook, as it is 3rd parties actually collecting the data and passing t on to Facebook.
How this is still legal in 2024, with all the privacy protections and laws that many countries have in place, is also quite a mystery.
Interestingly, Google is not in the top 10 of companies found passing data to Facebook. But this could also be because Google itself does not really sell user data to others. They collate data more for advertiser effectiveness (reach), and various ads are embedded by 3rd party app developers in their free apps on Google platforms.