Facebook tracks everything you like, share, comment on, and view.
It uses the data to power its ever-growing advertising platform, which is a significant part of the company's revenue stream. It knows whether you hate Donald Trump or not, whether you've recently watched an action or horror movie.
To some extent, this is good. If Facebook only follows us around the web to better serve our own preferences, that's acceptable.
However, a report published by ProPublica sheds light on the fact that the social media platform is trying to collect information about offline activities. It appears that Facebook is buying data from commercial data brokers, including Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, etc. The data – including information such as mortgages, salary details, restaurant choices, supermarket purchases, gender, location, etc. – is used to show relevant ads to users.
Facebook does not inform users about this data. It defended itself, saying that it does not collect this data itself and that the data is often provided by brokers to other advertising platforms.
If you want this information removed, according to Facebook, you'll have to reach out to the data providers directly. And it's a tedious process, which involves verifying your identity with a valid ID before the vendor deletes your information!
ProPublica says it downloaded a list of 29,000 categories — most of which are automatically generated — that Facebook offers to advertisers, including 600 categories from third parties. They note that the categories from commercial entities mostly relate to financial details. For example, “people have a household income between 100K and 125K.”.
You can check interests by going to Settings > Ads > Interest-Based Ads > Visiting Preferences.
In short, Facebook wants to collect a lot of data related to its users. At least Zuckerberg doesn't charge you for using it. On the other hand, the issue of privacy cannot be ignored.
