A new study looks at who is sending information about your online activity to Facebook

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.

While I don’t touch anything Meta (formerly Facebook) at any time, what is the explicit route of data gathering here?

From what I understand, these companies willingly give user data to Facebook, which then utilizes the data to: Use the provided information to match your Facebook user id with the other companies’ user id, so it can understand when you made an activity in the other companies’ sites, games etc. and show you stuff (ads only if you are naive, or propaganda through engineered post and ad visibility jf know at least about Cambridge Analytica) about it when you are in Facebook.

Is this the route user data follows and is utilized? If so, shouldn’t these mentioned other companies including Facebook’s and whatnot’s 3rd party tracking pixels n their own domains, and also sharing your data to themselves directly be the focus of privacy concerns as they “leak” your user data? Doesn’t the most of the blame fall on these other companies, or does the implied blame here that user data transfer is mutual and Facebook forwards these user data from company A to company B in the list, as well?

Karna
creator
link
fedilink
610M

It’s a sell and not leak of data. It’s actually called Server to Server (S2S) tracking.

https://tinuiti.com/blog/data-privacy/server-to-server-tracking/

https://revealbot.com/blog/facebook-conversions-api/

Create a post

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don’t promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

  • 0 users online
  • 57 users / day
  • 383 users / week
  • 1.5K users / month
  • 5.7K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 2.97K Posts
  • 74.6K Comments
  • Modlog