Worried about privacy? You may have already lost the battle.
Have you heard of ‘Coconut Palm Sugar’? I came across this delight during an evening coffee with friends. None of us had heard of it and the owner was happy to tell us where she bought it from. Within a few minutes, one of us received this post on her Facebook wall.
#Facebookislistening ! was the collective gasp.
Well as it turns out, in a recently published, widely cited WSJ article, Facebook is ‘not’ listening to your phone’s microphone, but it’s pretty much doing everything else.
Its tracking where you are, which websites you visit, what you are buying.
In the now famous congressional hearings, Mark Zuckerberg addressed this issue head-on and denied that #Facebookislistening .
Facebook may not be listening. However the past few months have thrown the privacy or the lack of it, out into a public debate — but it might be too late.
So how does this level of customised targeting happen? What tracking tools are working in the background and how much of our activities are actually tracked?
Your data is the resource and you are the product
To be clear, Facebook (and other major digital platforms google, twitter etc.) do not charge a ‘subscription fee’, which means that there is no option for you to ‘turn-off’ your ads. Ads is Facebook’s primary revenue stream, so your only choice is to see less relevant- more annoying ads by choosing strict ad settings or better customised ones with liberal ad settings.
To make the advertising experience relevant and customised for you, Facebook needs basically two things:
- Your permission to track and share your data on and off Facebook.
- Enough advertisers to consume this data and show you their products.
The more data is shared to a larger set of advertisers, the more customisable, relevant and contextual the ad content will become for you.
So, how is your data tracked and shared?
Tracking you on Facebook
Well this is easy. The average user spends 50 minutes on Facebook everyday. That is a lot of time, liking and commenting on posts, joining groups, playing games, signing up for apps and clicking on interesting advertisements. Needless to say all of this activity is tracked along with when, on which device and in which geographical location you used Facebook. Putting all of this together is a detailed map of your lifestyle, interests and behaviours. You just liked a blog on luxury shoes? Don’t be surprised to see a post from a high-street brand during lunchtime, and lo-and-behold their outlet is just a couple of blocks away.
To download a copy of your Facebook data click setting>Download a copy of your Facebook data>Start My Archive
Tracking you off Facebook
To be clear, your default ad settings ‘will’ allow your digital activities outside Facebook across multiple devices to be tracked. And not just digital, your ‘physical’ activities such as shopping, watching movies etc. can also be tracked. Before you get spooked about this, it is extremely commonplace not just for Facebook but for virtually all digital platforms and well known websites. Most websites use ‘tracking cookies’. In addition Facebook has a powerful tracking product called ‘Pixel’ which allows advertisers to build targeted audiences, optimise ads, re-market ads and track conversions. The Pixel code is now embedded into several thousand websites and gives Facebook ads unparalleled data to sharpen their messaging.
To be fair, especially after the congressional hearings, Facebook has gone to great lengths educating users about how their data is shared and how to control it.
Read about Facebook ads in detail on their blog.
Getting back control
Well, before trying to figure how to get back control of your data privacy, you should answer the following questions:
a. Are you ok to give up subscription free internet services such as social media, maps, video streaming etc.?
b. What worries you the most about data privacy? Regular advertising or mis-use like in the case of the US elections?
Chances are that you react very differently to these questions depending on your age. Gen Xers might be worried, Millennials might debate it, but the 16 year old Gen Z kid might question what all the fuss is about.
The fact is that we are now living in the digital age of humanity. Turning off digital services will be unsustainable for our urban lifestyles. The only other option is to restrict our ad preferences and then get served irrelevant and annoying ads.
What we should ask for, is for policy makers to drive accountability with digital companies. The use of data should be controlled and protected from being mis-used. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an important step in the right direction. This regulation has to be thought through and implemented across other regions.
In the meantime do not get worried if #facebookislistening. Even if it is, there is little you can do about it.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own and not representative of my organisation in any way
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