Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information

  • Not saying I condone it, but if you have a Facebook account you should expect that they will collect and use as much data as they can about you.

    If you don’t wish to be targeted with highly personalized ads, you should immediately delete your Facebook account and not use their services in any way.

    Agreeing to use their services is agreeing to these practices. Now, I think people should be made aware of these things, and they should know when they create an account that this is what they are going to do.

    Personally, I don’t really have a problem with it. Also saying that they “give advertisers access to” this data is a little disingenuous. As an advertiser I don’t have access to any of your information. I can only tell Facebook who to target, in this case with information that I already have about you, that you have (presumably) given to me with consent. Facebook takes care of the rest. It’s not as though I personally have access to a bunch of your information. Or even that any human being at Facebook does. No person is looking at your data, it’s all just algorithms.