Facebook obtains data on individual users from thousands of companies, and a new study (PDF) from Consumer Reports attempts to provide a more accurate number.
The researchers found that, on average, Facebook received data from 709 volunteers from 2,230 different companies. In one extreme example, “nearly 48,000 different companies were found in one volunteer’s data.” Facebook profile files show that a total of 186,892 companies provided profiles for all study participants.
Recruit volunteers with help from: mark Use the Download Your Info tool to extract their personal data from Facebook and share it with researchers.
Companies using Meta’s advertising platform upload customers’ personal information and purchasing habits, and Meta uses this information to deliver targeted ads to those people or people with similar profiles. Researchers believe that “micro-targeting” campaigns targeting specific user data were easy, resulting in the 96,000 companies listed targeting just one of the volunteers.
Ninety-six percent of study participants’ profiles contained information shared by a data broker called LiveRamp, but not all data brokers. Large retailers such as Home Depot, Walmart or Amazon are also present, while other small businesses are doing “surprisingly well”, such as an automaker in a Texas town of 24,665 people dealers, which covered 10% of the study’s volunteers. my own.
However, most are unrecognizable because they use meaningless character combinations like “Bm 5 100tkqc nlm” or generic names like “Viking”. But the name doesn’t matter, does it? Acxiom, the company that owns LiveRamp, says it can reach “more than 2.5 billion marketable consumers globally” and touts its “ability to build a complete view of the consumer to increase consumer acceptance.”
We’ve all heard people say that our smartphones are listening to us, and this must be how they know which ads to show us. The truth is, companies aren’t just sitting around waiting for us to talk about jeans—they already know what we want in jeans, what sizes we wear, which brands we like, and roughly what time of year we typically start buying jeans.
