Consumer Reports conducted an experiment which revealed that Instagram and Facebook collect your private data from thousands of firms.
The company is also the largest reporter of potentially child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), yet many of these reports are sent in a fashion that raises legal concerns.
To find out where parent firm Meta gets its personal data from for targeted advertising, Consumer Reports sought the assistance of over 700 volunteers.
The Markup, an American nonprofit news publication, says the study found that Meta collected data from an average of 2,230 companies.
Markup assisted Consumer Reports in finding study participants. The last three years' worth of participant data were retrieved from Facebook settings and sent to Consumer Reports in an archive.
A total of 186,892 companies shared data concerning them to the social network, according to Consumer Reports. 2,230 companies on average shared the data of each study participant to Facebook. This figure varied widely, with the data from some participants suggesting that over 7,000 companies submitted their data.
Undoubtedly, data brokers were the most common source of private information that the social media giant collected, but Amazon and Home Depot were also in the top 10.
The websites you visit are the most frequently acquired sort of data, either through cookies or tracking pixels that allow for the creation of an interest and activity profile.
If you search for bathroom fittings on Amazon, for instance, adverts for that particular product category or more general ones like home renovations may appear. Similarly, if you visit a lot of tech websites, you may be served gadget ads.
Meta states that it provides consumers with choices and is open about the data it collects and uses:
“We offer a number of transparency tools to help people understand the information that businesses choose to share with us, and manage how it’s used.”
However, the Electronic Privacy Information Centre argues that suggesting that customers understand the extent and nature of this tracking is foolish.
“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 […] 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 centre stated.