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Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

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21–30 of 478 posts

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#21
Another personal observation. I have an Instagram account that I thought was fully incognito. I never connected it to any other social account, I used a separate email for authentication etc. Just days after the Instagram founders left Facebook I started receiving friend suggestion on my IG that were very very relevant. Those were people I knew in real life and mostly connected via Facebook but not only. I shouldn't be surprized as being connected to the Internet by itself is an end to your privacy but still, this was probably the spookiest invasion into my privacy so far. Bye-bye Instagram.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#22
post #14

Facebook gonna Facebook. It's long past time to consider regulation of an ethically bankrupt corporation.

Why have costly government regulation when users can just quit? Plenty of other online and offline ways to connect with the people in your life.

Users cannot "just quit". Facebook probably has a profile for my grandma who never touched a PC in her whole life.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#23
post #18

This is exactly the kind of abuse that GDPR is designed to curtail.

Yes using information for a purpose other than it was collected for. Hopefully this means in Europe we won’t see this spam.

Hopefully? Hopefully this means we will see facebook employees faceing criminal charges!

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#24
Again? Weren't they called out on this about half a year ago already? Did they continue doing this? How irresponsible and total lack of any ethical standard. Its horrible but mostly just sad that users are just a commodity to make profit. So let's trick them to sign up for 2FA to pretend they have more security and then we can send them nice little ads. What a bad company this has become.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#25
The other really stupid thing, besides generally hurting the adoption of 2FA forever, is that they probably did it for hardly more than scraps, compared to their conventional add targeting capabilities.

Maybe I am completely wrong about this, but I'm pretty convinced that almost all of the ad spending for that feature would have reached Facebook's coffers anyways had it not been available.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#26
I didn’t give facebook my phone, my email has timed out (and facebook knows it, it deactivated my email) and I forgot my password, more or less intentionally. So the only thing tying me to Facebook is my browser cookie. I have to say, I’m surprised I’ve been able to keep this account open for years in this state, it’s almost as if they really wanted me to stay. But it’s possible to keep a facebook account alive with no accurate contact information.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#27

Facebook gonna Facebook. It's long past time to consider regulation of an ethically bankrupt corporation.

No regulation needed, just avoid using their 'services' and block anything facebook at the point of access. They might keep 'shadow profiles' and use facial recognition to find you on images posted by others but if you keep them out of your network they can have a ball trying to target their advertising at that closed door.

Not that I allow any advertising here, mind you - everything is blocked at the router (ipset [1] comes in handy here), at the client and in the browser. This works at home as well as abroad since I route all my data through a VPN (OpenVPN) terminating at my router.

[1] http://ipset.netfilter.org

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#29
post #2

I'm surprised people didn't know this... this has been happening for at least 4 years through custom audiences. An advertiser can upload a list of mobile numbers or email addresses to target people.

Actually this should be an act of "good faith" where you are adding a layer of security to your account and not about making even more harm to your account.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#30

Facebook gonna Facebook. It's long past time to consider regulation of an ethically bankrupt corporation.

It would be really surprising if that was a facebook only thing. For starters Google pesters me at least as much to add my phone number to secure my account.
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