Facebook’s ad targeting gets help from thousands of other companies
Researchers found that, on average, Facebook received data from 2,230 different companies for each of the 709 volunteers. One extreme example showed that “nearly 48,000 different companies were found in the data of a single volunteer.” In total, Facebook data archives showed that 186,892 companies had provided data on all of the study’s participants.
Surveillance capitalism. This should horrify us all.
I struggle to tell people in my life the extent to which they are being tracked. They think Facebook is it, "and what could they know about me?"
People don't realize that thousands of companies feed data to bigger tech companies like Facebook. Property records. Purchase histories. Tax payments. Health records. Online browsing history. Everything. Facebook merely collates all that data.
That this doesn't bother the hell out of people always mystifies me. When did we give up on a reasonable expectation of privacy?