What Does Facebook Know About My Likes and Dislikes?
Analysing the data Facebook uses for my recommendations and deciding which ads I see (without listening to my conversations)
Many of us have felt like our phones were listening to us before. You’ll be talking about something with a friend and later you look at your phone and see an advert of the very thing you were talking about.
The fact of the matter is, Facebook isn’t listening to your conversations. Not because of some moral standpoint or belief in consumer privacy (ha!) but because it simply isn’t feasible or efficient to do so. They know enough about you from your online behaviour and it is far easier and cheaper to collate information on your online activities than to collect and store thousands of exabytes of data or transcribe billions of hours of audio.
So the question is, why does it sometimes feel like they are listening? The answer comes in four main parts.
- They have a pretty good idea of what we like and dislike. This comes from our long history of online behaviour and how we interact with Facebook, combined with the same knowledge for every other user. This means they know what you, your friends and family all enjoy and dislike— the first indication of what you might be talking about at any given time. This is what I’ll be addressing in this article.
- They have information about our recent online activities, mostly on…
