Facebook privacy policy is a masterpiece of deception.
It’s intentionally vague, open-worded and doesn’t have any universal boundaries that
would put reasonable limits on Facebook’s tracking.
The data policy uses blanket terms like third parties, to cover a vast range of activities
that allow Facebook to follow your every step and do with that information whatever they want
When you agree to the terms of service, you as an Internet citizen cannot even imagine
the uses and value your personal information has to Facebook and the database marketing
industry behind it.
Facebook doesn’t just collect all of your personal information you upload on their website
through private chat conversations, expressions in likes and comments, or posts on your newsfeed.
Facebook will plant permanent trackers on your mobile and desktop devices to follow
you around the Internet to map all of your browsing history.
In cooperation with its marketing partners, Facebook helps to match that information with
your real-life data like social security number, physical address, age and family relationships.
Where does your data go after Facebook collects them?
What does Facebook privacy policy really means for your personal information?
There is an entire industry developed behind Facebook’s business model violating your privacy.
It doesn’t often make headlines and operates as secretively as high-profile banking.
And just like clandestine predatory banking threatens financial stability, Facebook is
standing up for industry that poses a threat to democratic values that enabled creation
of Facebook in the first place.
In the next few minutes, you’ll learn how Facebook stands behind major data broking
conglomerates who boast with their ability to predict and influence consumer behavior
based on the data collection facilitated by the Facebook company.
Nothing that’s mentioned here is a conspiracy theory.
The analysis is made of publicly available information and everything will have sources
in the description below.
Hopefully, information presented here will help you understand the intrusive scope of
Facebook privacy policy and maybe give you enough reason to want to stop using Facebook
immediately.
Because their manipulative marketing practices threaten everything free and democratic world
stands for.
What Facebook does with the privacy of Internet citizens is currently not regulated or supervised
and you don’t have the option to opt out, even you don’t use Facebook at all.
We are in an alarming situation were big database marketing industry collects private and personally
identifiable information on almost all adults on the Internet.
This information is used to make blanket judgments about people based on how profitable their
trading algorithms view them.
It’s an uncontrolled joint mechanism with the intent to influence and manipulate people
for their own benefit, where consumers have no say whatsoever.
Trading happens about them, but without them.
You should have a say in this.
You should now what’s happening to your private information, and where it goes once
Facebook collects it.
You should have the right to opt out, and not be an involuntary target of advertising
industry.
This year Google announced that it will track users offline behavior by connecting online
advertisements to purchases in brick and mortar stores, to verify its clients online ad impressions.
Meanwhile, Facebook has been actively doing this since 2014.
With the freshly rebuilt ad platform called Atlas, Facebook launched unified tracking
mechanisms to allow marketers to follow users across thousands of websites and mobile applications.
The service promotes itself as “reaching people across devices and bridging the gap
between online impressions and offline purchases”.
Atlas made it possible to identify specific subjects for targeted advertisements opening
up the world of possibilities for influential marketing techniques.
Analytics algorithm made it possible to determine certain personality traits to exploit for
profit.
They could find people with propensity to gambling, abusing knowledge of private information
that shouldn’t have been know to them, just so that they can deploy manipulative advertisements.
Atlas uses data to make stereotypical assumptions about people based on their race, gender,
location, and influence a specific behavior according to societal expectations.
Sometimes even enforcing trends like body shaming of young men and women, exploiting
people more susceptible to predatory lending, or taking advantage of addiction weaknesses
like smoking or alcohol.
People make mistakes, and privacy is to protect them from being exploited for those mistakes.
This is what happens when an entire industry forms around abusing people’s natural and
perfectly reasonable need for comfort and convenience.
Facebook’s affiliated mobile applications and web services give them access to your
location, phone number and telemetric data from your mobile devices.
All that’s necessary to develop capability for its marketing partners to make and maintain
permanent self-updating profiles.
Advanced algorithms rank people’s profiles according to their monetization opportunity.
“Waste” is a common word used to describe low level targets with little expectations
for profit generation.
Usual practice to deal with people ranked in this way is to put them on slower customer
service lanes, and offer discriminatory pricing, What Facebook cannot track for themselves,
its advertising partners will do it for them.
Facebook is affiliated with over 190 marketing partners that together form the biggest database
of personal information in the world.
They are all elite members of the marketing class, but the most famous names are Exparian,
Axciom, Epsilon, Vidsy Adobe, and Oracle.
According to a Federal Trade Commission report, seven out nine data brokers buy from or sell
information from their databases to each other.
These are channeled through series of data broking companies, making it impossible to
trace original source of particular data element.
The whole industry operates on a highly clandestine nature, offering strong encryption to its
clients, but near zero level protection of consumer data.
Privacy for corporations, but surveillance for everyone else.
Security breaches and hacker attacks are regular routine, to which marketing industry exposes
your private information.
One of the biggest brokers, Epsilon, had its database breached by unknown hackers.
The breach exposed millions of email address and consumer names for Epsilon’s top clients
including JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Target, and Walgreens.
It was never disclosed how much data was stolen.
Given the nature of current cyber laws, we may have never heard of countless of other
potential breaches.
Your private information could be floating around the Internet and you have no way to
stop it.
Axciom adopts an all around approach to tracking your private life.
Within high circles in the company, it’s known as “360-degree view” on consumers.
It uses its 40 year old database of offline information collected from government sources
and self-reported surveys, and past few decades of digital surveillance to develop its own
classification system to rank consumers.
This system, called PersonicX, categorizes Internet users to one of 70 socioeconomic
classes, each being marketed by its own rules.
For example, this system can determine whether someone is tech savvy, if they prefer to use
online banking, mobile devices, are price sensitive, and come from upper-middle-class.
With no spouse, they are assigned a class “savvy single”.
Thus, they’ll be marketed special tech deals with price coupons to appeal to their interests
and price responsiveness.
Whatever there is to know about this person is used to create a personalized deal to influence
them to click on the ad and make a purchase.
This, however, wouldn’t be be possible without a targeted invasion of their privacy.
The goal is to make sure a consumer buys from one of the members of their marketing chain,
and not someone else.
But that someone could have been a medium-sized retailer, who is in disadvantage, because
he doesn’t spy on your private life.
This retailer gets excluded from the Internet visible to you, because he is not part of
the elite wolf pack.
We are being told that online marketing is anonymous, so it doesn’t matter if they
breach our privacy.
But Axciom proves this is exact opposite of what marketing industry really does and wants.
AbiliTec Digital, one of Axciom’s many products, is described as “customer recognition”
service.
It works to link history of data with people’s names, nicknames, email and home addresses,
and phone numbers both mobile and landline.
In 2014 Axciom’s CEO boasted to have dropped 1.1 billion third party cookies on people
visiting client’s websites.
Why does he boast now?
It’s a marketing technique to attract even more clients and expand the industry.
Just like their website “aboutthedata.com” where you can take a peak at your data file.
However, this is just a major publicity stunt.
I don’t recommend that you proceed with looking yourself up on their website.
First of all, you’d have to provide various personal information, like your full name
and social security number.
You’d voluntarily give them even more of your private information.
Secondly, it might not even work for you anyway.
The website asks its users to update the missing data or correct if something’s wrong.
Again, you would only provide them with more personal information, and confirm that your
advertising ID truly matches your real identity.
In 2012, companies spent over $2 billion dollars on third-party data about individuals and
billions more on credit card data, just in the United States.
This personally identifiable information is used to specifically target individuals based
on their unique advertising profiles.
The whole process of targeted advertising happens through mechanism called high-frequency
trading.
It’s derived of algorithmic trading on stock exchange, were each transaction takes milliseconds
to complete.
Transactions are decided on by bids, where the highest bidder wins.
Such trading occurs in online advertisements as well.
On ad exchange, marketers place their bids for ad space on websites where they identified
highest prospects of success.
Automated ad sales system allows website operators to sell their ad space to the highest bids.
Websites use numerical customer codes derived from uniquely identifying cookies placed on
web browsers to track online activities of their visitors.
An ad exchange then takes these profiles, and cross-reference them with their third
party data aggregates using information like sex, age, interests, income range, and history
of purchases.
The exchange analytics then determines fair market value of websites visitors and the
ad spaces available to show them.
The whole process has to take less than 50 milliseconds.
What you are going to see on a website is determined before the page even loads.
That’s only possible because of the self-updating trackrecord of your online activity.
Companies maintaining these ad exchanges are PubMatic, Rubicon, Google’s DoubleClick,
or Facebook Exchange.
Facebook Exchange is now shifting towards Dynamic Ads.
Each of them make annual revenues of billions of dollars from advertisers paying for display
ads.
This is what makes Facebook such a huge fortune.
The social network is just a pretty make up.
Once gathered, the available data is listed in consumer data products catalog.
But these are not anonymous statistical categories, as you would expect.
Axciom’s clients can buy hundreds of details about individuals and households lumped together
in elements, like Christian families, money seekers, dieting/weight loss, and smoking/tobacco.
There is even an option to choose a race model – caucasians, hispanics, african-americans,
asians and so on.
A a specified retailer selling let’s say portable computing goods can ask Axciom for
specific information on million college students living in urban areas aged 18 to 25.
Axciom then asks for further identification of the retailer’s customers.
Whenever you pay for goods with your credit card, your identifiable information is scraped
from your credit card company.
If you supplied your ZIP code or phone number, that information is also tied to your advertising
ID.
The list of people who can thus know your purchasing or browsing history expands as
quickly as the whole marketing industry.
The advertising is never anonymous.
At best, it’s pseudonymous.
Each person using the Internet is automatically assigned an identification code that’s continuously
updated and cross-referenced with database of your public and private personal information.
However, Stanford University found out that many websites actually leak personally identifiable
information to third party trackers, matching user IDs with their real names.
The independently funded research found evidence of tracking companies stockpiling databases
of clickstreams – collected browsing histories.
The tracking starts from day one and continues until each clickstream can be assigned a pseudonym
(the unique ID).
If you click on an advertisement, first party leaks your personally identifiable information
to a third party.
Most frequently it’s gonna be your username or user ID, but it can also be your IP or
email address.
In most cases, third party companies act as first party at the same time – like Facebook,
Twitter, or Google+.
The third party then buys identifying information from a “customer recognition” service.
It’s also possible for a third party to exploit security vulnerabilities to learn
about your identity.
Finally, the third party matches your pseudonymous data against their identified data, creating
a finalized version of your profile.
It doesn’t matter at which point in the future they manage to attach the ID to your
clickstream.
Identification affects the data in the future as well as retroactively, and thus only needs
to happen once.
Sometimes, websites leak your username to dozens of third parties at once.
For example, Photobucket would send your username embedded in its URLs to 31 companies.
Filling out wrong password on the Wall Street Journal website will get your email address
sent to 7 companies.
These websites behavior never gets mentioned in their privacy policies.
And the same goes for Facebook privacy.
The Facebook privacy policy might as well just look like this:
Using our services you agree: to give us permission to spy on your EVERY
movement and activity 24/7, within Facebook as well as all over the Web and your offline
physical activities, and store this information indefinitely and permanently.
to share all information we have about you with anybody who is willing to pay for them
or at least ask for them nicely.
We make sure our advertisers, our third parties, and third parties of our third parties, know
exactly who you are and what you do, so that you are more susceptible to manipulation and
surveillance.
Facebook doesn’t explain that they use your private conversations, your browsing habits,
track record of articles you read, videos you watch, music you listen to, things you
buy, to create and maintain a unique psychological profile of your identity to store permanently
and use indiscriminately by the whole industry.
Tracking users activity on their own website is one thing.
But actively pursuing collection of information on people’s activities on the Internet just
steps over the line by miles.
People don’t know how websites work and talk to each other, so they rationally believe
that what they share with Facebook, stays on Facebook.
People think nobody listens to their online conversations, because nobody does it in real
life.
People think sending emails is like sending letters in an envelope, when in virtual reality,
everything is visible as text on a postcard.
By walking out of a brick and mortar store, your interaction with the business ends and
everything you do the moment you step outside is unknown to the owner of the store.
Purchase goods online with the same retailer, and suddenly it’s not enough to just pay
with money.
You have to unknowingly hand over all of your past and future life as another form of payment
for using their service.
Technology is several steps ahead of our understanding, and society and laws haven’t caught up yet.
It creates a loophole for an entire industry to flourish, while values that hold together
the system in tranquility and freedom are being torn apart in the process.
We might just have reached a point were we have to collectively decide that profit of
a few doesn’t necessarily serve the greatest benefit for us all.
There is no solution where marriage with these companies is still a reality.
You can’t have your private life protected while still agreeing to these privacy policies.
You have to stop using Google.
You have to stop using Facebook.
It’s not just the government surveillance that’s a problem here.
The whole industry went rogue.
There has to be a new regulation that catches up with our privacy standards of the past.
If the commercial Internet destroys everything that allowed it to become reality in the first
place, then this will make it into history books as a failure of free society to guard
its own liberty.
Do we want to live in a world where a handful of marketing companies control all private
information of every adult Internet user?
Soon, Internet will be used by everybody on Earth.
Not using it will not be an option.
Next privacy policy might as well just be “when turning 18, you agree to have your
life monitored 24/7 to be used by advertisers and the government for all general purposes.
If you disagree with this policy, feel free to opt out of living.”
Is this what convenience has to cost us?
The solution to this problem is simple but not easy.
We need a dotcom equivalent of do not call law.
Do not call law is a regulation maintained by the United States Federal Communications
Commission that keeps a registry of people wishing to opt-out from telemarketers calling
their numbers for advertising purposes.
Similarly, online marketers and websites should not be allowed to track Internet citizens,
if they wish to opt out.
Tracking of browsing history should be illegal.
No website needs to see what you do outside of their services to “improve their services”.
Tracking of logged out users through like and share buttons on websites should be banned.
Likewise, companies should be barred from collecting information on people visiting
websites using their third party tools like Google Analytics or Facebook advertisements.
When you visit a website that uses Facebook adverts, you are not using Facebook services,
and should not be subjected to their data collection.
Your browsing history should be between you and your Internet Service Provider and no
one else.
ISPs shouldn’t blackmail or deceive you into defaults.
Just like Facebook, Google’s business model also stands in the way of free and open Internet.
You can also learn more about Google’s dirty industry practices that threaten free market
and digital rights in my other video.
If you feel like Facebook privacy policy is too much for you, you can find ways to protect
your online privacy.
There is a useful guide on privacytools.io where you can learn privacy protection step
by step.
I also made an easy to follow video tutorial on how to protect your privacy online that
you can use even if you are not tech savvy.
On this channel, I want to work on exposing clandestine business practices that go against
our digital rights and individual freedoms.
If you want to see more analyses like this one and useful ways how to protect your online
identity and privacy, subscribe to my channel for more videos in the future.
Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
It’s essential that we spur debate about Facebook privacy problem.
Sooner or later, this is going to have be about more than just installing privacy extensions
on your browser.
Facebook’s marketing industry already started the legal battle.
It’s our turn now.