If you are on Facebook, the Meta owned platform tracks as many activities of your day as it can. At the very least, it will try to know all about you. A tech journalist has revealed that data from her own Facebook account shows she was tracked an average of 33 times a day. What is even scary is the tracking was done by websites and apps that aren’t even connected to her social media accounts.
Facebook is owned by Meta. The company also owns Instagram and WhatsApp. In Africa, these 3 platforms are the most used social media platforms. With 170 million active users, Facebook stands tall in the African Social Media scene. It means about 44% of Africa’s social media users are on Facebook. Further, there are an estimated 9.2 million WhatsApp users in Kenya.
Data for Ads Optimization
Meta Pixel (Facebook Pixel), is a piece of JavaScript code that can be embedded on a website to track how visitors interact with that site and Facebook and Instagram ads. This piece of code allows Meta to track our activities far beyond what we share on its platforms.
It is data from these tracking that Meta uses to fuel its ad business. Advertising revenue for Q4 2023 was $38.7 billion compared to $31.3 billion in the same period in 2022. This represented a growth of 23.8%. Ad revenue is crucial to Meta as it contributed to 25% year on year growth in the total revenue for Meta in the last year.
It’s the significance of the revenue from Ads that pushes Meta to sacrifice user data privacy. Matilda Davies found out that Meta was tracking everything from her sleep pattern to her purchases. Facebook allows users to download their data. From her downloaded data, Matilda Davies was able to learn just how much the platform knows about her. This was data Meta collected since on her from the age of 11 years old.
Meta Knows When You Sleep
On her phone, she has installed an Alarm app. The app, Alarmy, shared her information with Meta more than 6,800 times in two years. “Once for every time I woke up, hit snooze or reset it.”, she wrote in an article in the Times.
With the growth of Taxi hailing apps such as Uber and Bolt, Meta is looking for this information. The 28-year-old reports that Meta tracked her taxi apps usage 42 times. Keen to gain data on her commute, Meta also tracked her train ticket apps 35 times.
So when you wake up the platform knows. It knows how you move about. At the end of the day, it will know you are back home and when you tuck in to sleep.
Private Health and Finance Data
Scaringly, Meta has no qualms tracking your most private data. In a period spanning over two years, Ms Davies found that her prescription medications orders were tracked. She had placed the orders via the LloydsDirect app 37 times. Secondly, she used another health app 20 times to book doctor appointments. This data was also collected and stored by Meta. The social media platform was even aware she had signed up on a stem cell register.
Visiting health care websites that had installed Meta Pixels also exposed her data to Meta. For example, the Macmillan Cancer Trust had installed Meta Pixels on its website for an Ad campaign. Hence, each time Ms Davies visited the trusts website, her information was relayed to Meta.
READ: Facebook Under Probe for Alleged Role in Illegal Drugs Sales
Due to the JavaScript code, a bank sent data each time she opened the banking app. Meta was even informed of the date she put in an application for a credit card. She wrote, “PensionBee shared data about when I signed up, the Pensions Regulator and the government’s Money Helper website shared when I sought advice and the Insolvency Experts shared when I contacted them to track down an old employer.”
The company knew everything. Shockingly, she found that almost every British bank sends data to the American tech giant.
Government Tracking
The intrusive nature does not stop with private entities. Her information and digital activities were also shared by government websites. To answer her query on matter, a government spokesman said this was to help the government run digital advertising campaigns. The spokesman said the campaigns are “to increase awareness of vital public services.”. He further added that the practice was “standard” for the government across the country.
From her own research using data from her Facebook account, the UK journalist found out that Meta knew almost everything about her. The intrusive nature of the data collection meant that she needed not upload the data to any Meta platform for the company to gain access.
A spokesperson from the social media giant told her, “Our policies require advertisers to have the necessary rights and permissions, including people’s consent where applicable, to use our business tools data, we don’t want or permit advertisers to send sensitive information about people through our business tools.”
Meta Data Privacy Challenges
But this is not the company’s first rodeo. It was found before that Facebook colluded with troubled data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to influence people during U.S.’s polls, among other elections in the world including Kenya’s. This was back in 2016. In 2019, Facebook agreed to pay a $5 billion fine to patch things up with regulators as stipulated by the law. At the time, the social media company also promised that it will bolster data privacy.
As it is, the promise is far from becoming a reality.
