A new study looks at who is sending information about your online activity to Facebook

Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data.

  • @noodlejetski@lemm.ee
    60•10 months ago

    inb4 “HOw Is tHiS nEWS”

    the more it’s being talked about, the more difficult it will be for people to ignore.

    • StantanaEnglish
      44•10 months ago

      Everybody knows Facebook surveils, but seeing actual numbers is still newsworthy. Particularly when they’re catastrophically high.

  • @Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    36•10 months ago

    20 years ago there would have been an outrage. Today, people are fine with it. I don’t understand that shit. Yet those same people were quick to jump on byte dance, because china.

    There should be rules and regulations across the board, un- influenced by bribes lobbying.

    • KarnaOPEnglish
      26•10 months ago

      Back in '50s, the connection between Tobacco products and Cancer was evident. Since '70s connection between Fossil fuel and Global warming was evident.

      Yet, no one heeded those warnings at the time. With cancer rate going up, and climate becoming increasing unpredictable/extreme, people now started to take notice.

      With so much information to process, Human brain ignores information that doesn’t have a clear relation to a significant real world problem that immediately impacts their lives. This makes us intelligent (at short term) and dumb (at long term) at the same time.

      Using a service at free of cost (at the expense of your privacy) is acceptable by majority of population as it has no significant real world impact on their lives.

      If tomorrow, a huge data leak from these imbecile data hoarders leads to massive transaction fraud/identify theft that impacts a significant percentage of population and their daily lives, only then there will be massive outrage that you expect.

      Till then, we are the only one who escaped the Matrix, while rest embraced it.

      • @ililiililiililiilili@lemm.ee
        7•10 months ago

        People are stupid, apathetic, profiting off the status quo, or just too exhausted from trying to keep a roof over their head. The role of government should be to protect citizens from being taken advantage of by corporations. We need a new (or heavily amended) Bill of Rights for our modern civilization. Unfortunately in the US: our politicians are servants of corporations rather than citizens. It’s a free buffet for our data (that has been collected through better-than-Orwellian means) and nobody seems to give a fuck. I’m just rambling… I wish there were more of us who gave a shit and demanded privacy protections.

      • Thorned_Rose
        3•10 months ago

        I’ve have never once had my credit card details stolen or lost money because I hd an account ‘hacked’ or whatever. And yet, my family and in laws regularly have the card details stolen. They’re completely oblivious to the link between their lack of privacy considerations and getting their data stolen. So even significant real world impact still doesn’t change some people’s behaviour 🤦🏻‍♀️

    • @MonsiuerPatEBrown@reddthat.comEnglish
      1•10 months ago

      and twenty-five years ago all those companies probably would have wanted you to have their mailing address and phone number.

      times have changed.

  • Fleppensteyn
    7•10 months ago

    Years ago, Facebook kept nagging about privacy settings and almost pushed users to turn off all tracking etc.

    Now, my Facebook always says there is no recent activity, downloading all data from FB shows they seem to have nothing on me. So are they just lying about what they share with who?

  • @Land_Strider@lemmy.world
    2•10 months ago

    While I don’t touch anything Meta (formerly Facebook) at any time, what is the explicit route of data gathering here?

    From what I understand, these companies willingly give user data to Facebook, which then utilizes the data to: Use the provided information to match your Facebook user id with the other companies’ user id, so it can understand when you made an activity in the other companies’ sites, games etc. and show you stuff (ads only if you are naive, or propaganda through engineered post and ad visibility jf know at least about Cambridge Analytica) about it when you are in Facebook.

    Is this the route user data follows and is utilized? If so, shouldn’t these mentioned other companies including Facebook’s and whatnot’s 3rd party tracking pixels n their own domains, and also sharing your data to themselves directly be the focus of privacy concerns as they “leak” your user data? Doesn’t the most of the blame fall on these other companies, or does the implied blame here that user data transfer is mutual and Facebook forwards these user data from company A to company B in the list, as well?