We all know Facebook is obsessively collecting your private information. These days data collection seems to be the primary business goal of this company. But what most people do not know is that Facebook does not just collect and archive data taken from your profile. Facebook keeps huge databases of so called “shadow profiles”. These profiles contain information you never gave to them. Infact, the information in these profiles is so sensitive, no one would ever allow them to have it.
Facebook is a large customer of third-party data-brokers, companies that compile huge dossiers on people based on their spending, internet and phone usage, their employment history and so on. Also, Facebook encourages users to upload their entire address books to their system to “find your friends,” and while doing this, most Facebook users do not realize that they are leaking sensitive information, including nicknames, private numbers, and connections to the system.
So the website mines this data to create their “shadow profiles” of its billions of users. And yes, these profiles are literally filled with data about you that you have never consciously provided to the system. It is data mined from third parties, including your friends, but also those spooky data-brokers we mentioned before. Facebook’s shadow profile system was first confirmed in 2013 when it accidentally leaked all of the users’ shadow profiles to them along with their own data. Something the company says it will never do again out of (ironic) respect for the privacy of the people who provided the data that goes into your shadow profile.
The ”shadow profiles” are not voluntary and there’s no opt-out. Facebook even has shadow profiles on people who never used the service. For example, even though we are not a Facebook users, multiple people have uploaded their address books containing our email addresses and phone numbers to the system, allowing Facebook to create a profile of all our contacts by looking at who lists us as a contact.
Mark Zuckerbergs Facebook doesn’t like, and doesn’t use, the term “shadow profiles.” because it sounds like Facebook creates hidden profiles for people who haven’t joined the network, which Facebook says it doesn’t do. Ofcourse the company is not being honest about this, as we just explained.
The majority of the users are unaware of the reach and the power of the”shadow profiles”. Because shadow-profile connections happen inside Facebook’s algorithmic black box, people can’t see how deep the data-mining of their lives truly is, until an uncanny recommendation pops up.
Examples: (from Gizmodo)
- A man who years ago donated sperm to a couple, secretly, so they could have a child—only to have Facebook recommend the child as a person he should know. He still knows the couple but is not friends with them on Facebook.
- A social worker whose client called her by her nickname on their second visit, because she’d shown up in his People You May Know, despite their not having exchanged contact information.
- A woman whose father left her family when she was six years old—and saw his then-mistress suggested to her as a Facebook friend 40 years later.
- An attorney who wrote: “I deleted Facebook after it recommended as PYMK a man who was defense counsel on one of my cases. We had only communicated through my work email, which is not connected to my Facebook, which convinced me Facebook was scanning my work email.”
Facebook does what it can to downplay how much data exactly it gathers through contacts, and how widely it casts its fishing net. “People You May Know suggestions may be based on contact information we receive from people and their friends,” Facebook spokesperson Matt Steinfeld wrote in an email.
How do you stop Facebook from collecting data? Well, you have to contact every person you know who ever received your contact information and uploaded it to Facebook and ask them to go to Facebook’s contact management page and delete it. That is really the only way.
Don’t miss anyone. “Once a contact is deleted, we remove it from our system, but of course it is possible that the same contact has been uploaded by someone else,” Steinfeld wrote in an email.
Source: Hack News
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