Facebook’s Tentacles – Custom Audience Privacy Issue

Update 17/07/2018: I’d expect I will get a few people rolling their eyes in silence at me, particularly from the AdTech crowd, but I feel strongly enough about the issue that I have decided to start contacting each company appearing in the screenshot to ask them to remove my personal details from any “Custom Audience” Ad campaigns.

I am happy for companies I deal with to add me to their direct mailing list to advise me of any running specials periodically through E-mail, but I am not comfortable with that information subsequently being given to 3rd parties such as Facebook (being a particularly “privacy hostile” entity at that), The less personal information that goes to Facebook the better, I feel they have already become too powerful to our longer term collective detriment, by way of them feasting on our information, particularly given their ongoing business conduct.

Original post: After having logged into my Facebook account for the first time in a fortnight,  Today I learn that businesses have been uploading their customer contact database to Facebook.  A trawl over the internet reveals that this has apparently been in place since 2013.

A question is whether or not organizations giving their contact list to Facebook constitutes, “Sharing your personal details with a 3rd party”?

Advertisers you’ve interacted with – Who have added their contact list to Facebook. (often unbeknown to the people on their contact list)

Facebook states, These advertisers are running ads using a contact list they or their partner uploaded that includes info about you. This info was collected by the advertiser or their partner, typically after you shared your email address with them.”

Reading further, it appears more than just your email they can choose to upload. The information that could be included for matching includes things like your Phone number, Birthday, Gender, etc.

If companies are uploading their customer contact lists to Facebook as per Facebook’s Custom Audiences program, in my view, that pretty much lays at least the base, if they have actually chosen to do so, for Facebook to develop the alleged shadow profiles of Non-Facebook users and personally with me at least, this is NOT okay.

They say they drop all the info if there is no match, but after their ongoing antics, who can trust what Facebook Inc. actually says?

Facebook’s Tentacles – Custom Audience Privacy Issue

2 thoughts on “Facebook’s Tentacles – Custom Audience Privacy Issue

  1. cow says:

    what? you didn’t use a real email address for facebook did you?
    still that’s pretty shitty that its opt out rather than opt in.

    1. Fergus Young says:

      I originally used a throw away one SomeRandomStringOfCharacters (at) young.kiwi to sign up to Facebook
      FB may have nailed me when they locked me out of my account one time and demanded a phone number that they could send a text to. Have since purchased a $1 Vodafone simcard from Hardly Normal and changed the Phone No on my FB profile to that Vodafone one. Seems to have been sufficient to stop FB in their tracks in relation to this data-matching (at least for now)

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