“Unless you grant permission”

Crystal Ryan
Nov 5 · 3 min read
Image Credit: Apple.com

Have you ever been having a conversation about something, and then the very next day, that something appears as a suggested ad in your newsfeed?

I have.

I thought that maybe my phone was listening, that when I was talking to a girlfriend about going shopping for ugly Christmas sweaters, my Iphone listened, and has now resulted with Facebook targeting me with ugly sweater ads. How?

It turns out, this is kinda how social media companies like Facebook target you. Facebook specifically has algorithms that work in cyberspace to track what you’re up too, and then uses that data to target specific ads towards you. These ads are targeted towards you based on your previous locations, your age, your gender, items you’ve put in shopping carts on other websites… the list goes on.

Image Credit: Facebook.com

We consent to this data collection through a click-wrap agreement (the terms and conditions none of us read before clicking ‘I Accept’). Once we agree, we enable these sites to use our own data against us. I’ve never read more then 5 lines into a terms and conditions pop up on any site, and I think that’s the point. Companies want you to mindlessly accept so they can continue to track your web history and exposure, to target you specifically for marketing purposes. A survey conducted in 2001 showed that only 3% of people claimed to have read these terms and conditions, and only 23% claimed to have understood the privacy policy.

So surely my Facebook account isn’t actually listening to me right? Right??

Wrong.

When digging deeper into Facebooks “Why am I seeing this ad” tab, I came across this:

“Unless you grant permission”

Photo Credit: Facebook.com

Yep. I just opened my app and changed my settings faster then you can count to 5. Do you know if you’ve mindlessly given Facebook permission to listen to your conversations? Maybe you should check.

In the discussion of what you’re allowing your device access too, I also noticed that specific websites are linked. I was mindlessly online shopping the other day, and had a few things in my shopping cart when I decided I didn’t feel like spending that much money (admit it, we all do it). What happened next was a little shock to the system. I was emailed by that company, asking me if I had forgotten to check-out. My immediate thought was, oh I must be logged in — I wasn’t. Yet, somehow the website knew my email address.

F R E A K Y

So how does this happen and how can we prevent it?

The websites you visit are constantly collecting your data to track how to market to you better in the future. They do this through things like cookies.

You can use an ad-blocker which will generally disable ads and cookies, or if you’re now a little more paranoid, you can browse the web anonymously.

Now that I know that my Iphone can actually be listening to me, i’ll be spending the next few days attempting to take this permission away from the apps I currently have downloaded and disabling all web cookies from websites. Wish me luck.

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