"Just Me" setting on Facebook doesn't exclude advertisers
8 replies, posted
My own research, not strictly news. No idea if this should be elsewhere but it's something to be annoyed about. Since I'm using a halfway translated version of Facebook, some details may be worded differently when translated.
TL;DR useful link below.
I don't really use Facebook, I only have an account to manage a page. I could count the number of likes or messages I've sent on Facebook on my own hands. All personal details I've ever entered have been marked (either immediately or soon after) to be visible to "Just Me".
Since I wanted to purge the remaining personal data that was left there, I figured the best way to do so was to download my data (Settings > General > Download a copy of data you have on Facebook) and see what's left.
I've noticed a curious detail ("Ads" section):
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/169870/944f8542-3487-4fba-964a-4e39ac886fc9/image.png
So of course there's some anonymous advertisers I've never heard about, and since Facebook lets you do just about anything, I figured I could also remove them. Truns out you can.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/169870/3cdfda99-52b1-4570-9794-130ba5794511/image.png
https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/
The above page is divided into sections.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/169870/ee007e68-65f5-4320-b356-389a171c4832/image.png
The first sections is your interests, and it's what you would expect it to be (I've removed them as you can see, but the listed ones are "Online advertising", "Cloud Computing", "Online"(?), "Telecommunications"). You can remove all of them, one by one.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/169870/6257c17f-801d-43c9-b232-2f13594226d1/image.png
In the same system as above, you can manually remove companies that you've "interacted" with. I put it in quotes since I'm pretty sure ads from Sonic drive-in would never be relevant to me anyways, but it's in the list either way.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/169870/be54ca46-4c98-4c4e-b988-d4cb95ba9175/image.png
Skipping one, we get to Ad settings. I won't go translating these, but you'll probably want to set them to "No" and "Nobody". This part also links to YourOnlineChoices.eu, which lets you out out of targeted advertiging from participating companies, which I would say is worth checking out.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/169870/87401455-40ec-47e8-b05b-de931a786505/image.png
One thing I have to commend facebook for is temporary or permanent hiding of ads relevant to alcohol, parenthood or pets. Though honestly I'd prefer if they just didn't target ads in the first place.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/169870/85e4167f-484c-4985-b4bb-36f411a410e7/image.png
Now here's the reason I'm writing this whole thing. There's a note that this doesn't affect visibility, but when changing visibility, there is no note that advertisers will be able to see hidden information.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/169870/9313a2f5-c1e3-49c1-8cc0-a131037820fd/image.png
Both my birthday and relationship status on Facebook are set to be visible to "Just me", yet they're happily listed among the categories, since I didn't explicitly disable them on the ads preferences. They're not exactly life-ruining private information (which shouldn't be on Facebook anyway), but I'm fairly sure there's people with greater concerns.
You might be thinking "those are minor details, literally who cares?"
The point is that if you do not specifically tell Facebook that you do not want your data shared with advertisers, they probably will. Things like, oh I don't know, your phone number or email addresses? I wouldn't exactly trust them at this point, especially with the recent "growth at all costs" memo being leaked.
With their mass of data, they don't even need you to have an active account, they can just assume your friend group based on you just exchanging emails with people who imported contacts into Facebook.
TL;DR useful links:
Download data facebook has on you (link under the list):
https://www.facebook.com/settings
Disable everything advertising related on Facebook that you can:
https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/
Disable targeted advertising from participating companies (European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance) (though most are unavailable so that might not have much effect):
Your Online Choices | EDAA
This shit is why they purposefully convolute their privacy settings.
And once they get wind that people have started figuring this out they'll change it and obfuscate these settings even more.
Do you have any evidence that advertisers are able to fetch data on who is in these groups, as opposed to just being able to target those groups for ads?
Imo Facebook needs to drastically strip back their privacy settings. Not just "redesign" them but actually strip that shit way back. Other sites like Instagram and Twitter just give you one simple privacy setting: do you want your entire profile public, or private? With Facebook it's like Jesus fucking Christ some of my posts are friends only, some are public, some of my profile is hidden completely, I can hide posts from individual people, sure it's nice to have but I rarely use it and it's just a confusing labryinth of settings
Not saying it necessarily needs to go all the way down to one setting, but it should be a lot simpler than it is now imo, maybe with optional advanced mode still available.
*capitalism
That joke made me laugh
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