[Puer]

Boy, if you think the amount of data FB sells is creepy, wait until you find out how much information your insurance provider sells, or your cell phone provider, or your credit card provider, or your health provider...

If you ever get in a car accident in the United States don't be surprised to get mail the very next day from accident insurance attorneys because you bet every service you use is selling every aspect of your life without your explicit knowledge or consent. Every time you use a credit card to purchase something that information is sold to a network larger than you can imagine, who will in turn sell it to their network. Your geographical location is sold by your cellphone provider whether you realize it or not and whether you think you have GPS tracking turned off. If you have a SIM card that's tied to you as an individual, it's being sold.

Here's just one example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/19...

Notice how the keyword is "suspend"? I don't doubt that they've quietly resumed the practice. In fact, I bet all of these companies and service providers are overjoyed right now that the media is so focused on FB to care about all of the shady shit they're doing on a daily basis.

I'd rather not have any of my data shared, of course, but if I had to pick and choose between my health insurance being sold and versus what TV shows I liked on FB, I'll take the TV shows any day.

[jackvalentine]

Is this reply meant to be for me? It doesn't seem specifically relevant.

[Puer]

Facebook isn't tapping your phones microphone 24/7. It's a nice little dystopian theory that's been disproven time and again.

A far more probable and less exciting explanation is that your credit card provider (or the store you bought the wine from) is selling your information and Facebook happens to be one of the buyers.

Furthermore, people grossly overestimate how unique they are. At any given point in time you're a target market for millions of products, you just don't notice the ads for the ones you don't buy. Just because there's a correlation doesn't mean you were singled out as an individual.

[18pfsmt]

I think something shady was going on with the company formally known as Axciom:

"On May 14, 2014, Acxiom announced that it had acquired LiveRamp, a data onboarding company, for $310 million. LiveRamp was founded in 2011 as a spinout of RapLeaf, a marketing data and software company founded in San Francisco, California in 2005 by Auren Hoffman and Manish Shah.

In May[2017], LiveRamp announced a consortium formed with two other ad tech companies, AppNexus and MediaMath, to compete with Facebook and Google in the area of programmatic advertising, the term used to refer to the use of automation software to buy advertising.

In 2016, LiveRamp acquired two data and identity-matching startups, Arbor and Circulate, for more than $140 million combined. The company also announced the launch of IdentityLink, a method of anonymizing consumer's identities as they are tracked across multiple platforms.

In February 2018, Acxiom announced a reorganization from three divisions into two - a Marketing Solutions group and its LiveRamp business. In May, the company announced international expansion into Brazil, Netherlands and Italy, and released Global Data Navigator (GDN), a portal for identifying available data elements by country. In June 2018, Consumer research firm GfK MRI has partnered with Acxiom."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveRamp#2010s

[jackvalentine]

Well that's my point - however they're doing the targeting is so good as to be creepy and so I wish there was a way for me to force them to show me why I'm seeing a particular ad.