Four hidden ways Big Tech platforms suck up your data
Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon collect personal user data from many different sources to create "secret identities" of people in order to understand users' personality traits, predict purchasing behavior, and ultimately sell these profiles to advertisers and sometimes the government.
Most often, users don't even realize that their data is being collected and exploited by tech companies. Besides advertisers, millions of people’s personal user data has also been sold to U.S. federal agencies for border control purposes as well as to the military for counterterrorism purposes.
User data can also be used by machine learning or artificial intelligence tools that are being used by entities in the criminal justice system to help the government make decisions, including who should be imprisoned to a person's ability to enter a country.
Here are some of the largest and most surprising ways user data is captured and exploited by Big Tech, most often through hidden and complicated methods.
The largest social media company in the world collects information on its 2.4 billion monthly users even when they are not on the platform by tracking their browsing history, including the news they read, pornography they watch, websites they shop at, and more.
Using a tool called "Off-Facebook Activity," Facebook users can see all of the external browsing data the platform secretly collects without notifying anyone. Since August 2019, Facebook allows users to see the vast amounts of external data collected about them that previously no one had access to.
This tool is the reason why, after a user visits a Rollerblade store website, for example, the user is then likely to see ads for Rollerblades on his or her Facebook News Feed or on Instagram soon thereafter. All websites visited and many phone apps send Facebook a user’s digital activity that the social media company then uses to target people with ads.
The "Off-Facebook Activity” tool explains how Facebook’s advertising surveillance system actually works, with many users being incredibly shocked by what they find.
Several phone apps even send sensitive user data, including health information, like how a woman tracks her period and ovulation, to Facebook without users’ consent.
Although Facebook's terms and conditions ask app developers not to send sensitive health information, Facebook appeared to have accepted such data regardless.
Learn the simple steps on how to get Facebook to stop tracking you outside its platform here.
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Google, which is the most visited website in the United States with billions of users worldwide, monetizes its users in two major ways, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group: It gathers user data to build profiles of people using their interests, location, and demographics to let advertisers target particular groups of people based on those certain traits, and second, it shares some of its data with advertisers directly and requests them to bid on individual ads.
Its second method of making money from users is what most people would consider "selling user data." Google helps third-party ad placement in a complicated process known as "real-time bidding.”
The ad bidding is a system in which websites and publishers auction off ad space on their sites or in their apps, and in doing so, they share user data, including browsing history, location, device IDs, and other relevant online user behavior to hundreds of different advertising technology companies that Google works with.
Two of the biggest third-party ad companies on the internet, AdMob for phone apps and Ad Manager (formerly DoubleClick) for web browsing, have been purchased by Google, and so the company profits from their dominance in the ad market.
Furthermore, through its "Customer Match" program, Google's customers, advertisers, can ask for what kinds of users they want to reach, and Google then serves them ads in exchange for money. This is an indirect method of sharing user data, but users are targeted nevertheless. Anyone who clicks on the ads Google serves up is sent directly to the advertiser's website, where the advertiser can immediately collect user location, past browsing, and more.
Some of Google's user data even makes it into the hands of law enforcement through a database called “SensorVault,” which stores detailed user location data indefinitely. The data is so precise that one deputy police chief told EFF that it “shows the whole pattern of life.” The location data is collected by cellphone towers and GPS signals, even when people are not making calls or using Google apps. Google says that users have to opt in to location data collected in SensorVault, but the search giant makes it difficult not to opt in, and many users may not understand that they have done so, EFF reported.
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Amazon
Like Facebook and Google, Amazon is also increasingly offering more and more intrusive ways for advertisers to target users based on searches, demographics, and interests.
However, unlike other Big Tech companies, its ad services are much stronger and more accurate because it knows exactly what users have bought on Amazon.com, removing much of the guesswork that advertisers often have to do to target the right user.
The company has been growing its ad service for brands and companies to use direct data on shoppers, including delivery addresses and credit cards used, according to the New York Times.
Amazon also uses online tracking tools to follow customers' online behavior on other websites, even after they leave Amazon.com. The retail giant does not disclose the name or identity of users to advertisers, but it nevertheless serves users ads on a brand’s behalf by leveraging the user’s past behavior, often without his or her knowledge.
In the past few months, Amazon has also spied on its workers to track and bust union-organizing activity and is installing cameras on its trucks with always-on, 360-degree surveillance capability of drivers, as well as the public. Some senators have even questioned this new initiative.
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Online ad trackers
Large third-party online tools such as AddThis and ShareThis offer deceptively simple services that allow websites to integrate social media “share” buttons on their site to allow content to be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other online platforms.
A large number of websites take advantage of their simple plugin "share" tool, and this allows the companies to track and profile website visitors and make money off this data.
This business model is not unique, and many companies in the online advertising space collect user’s personal data through "free" services or features. Millions of people’s data is secretly taken from them in this manner, without their awareness, according to Privacy International, a digital rights group in the United Kingdom.
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