Facebook may be sending the personal data of its users to network providers and phone manufacturers in the hope that they buy highly-personalised adverts.
It is also claimed Facebook has helped at least one company direct its ads at users based on their presumed credit rating.
Facebook has repeatedly given anonymised mass user data via its apps to around 100 partner companies in 50 countries in a move touted as enabling ‘better business decisions’ for its partners.
The data sharing forms one arm of a broader program focused on improving network connectivity, Facebook claims.
But the ‘anonymous’ data collected by Facebook contains an eyebrow-raising amount of personal detail – including user demographics, device specs, personal interests, use of video and information about your friends.
It is this data that Facebook is said to have used to actively help the partner firms target adverts — for example, at specific racial demographics, The Intercept reports.
Documents from the ‘Actionable Insights’ project obtained by The Intercept suggest that the program could also be used to ‘single out individual customers on the basis of creditworthiness’ for example so adverts could be tailored to those with good or bad credit ratings.
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Facebook may be gifting user data to network providers and phone manufacturers to encourage them to buy better targeted adverts from the social media firm (Stock image)
Intercept writer Sam Biddle spoke with an anonymous Facebook source who disclosed confidential marketing documents from the ‘Actionable Insights’ program.
The data Facebook is reportedly sharing includes technical information about user devices and Wi-Fi or mobile network use, as well as user interests, past locations and even social groupings gathered by the Facebook, Messenger and Instagram apps.
Partners can use the free data to assess their position against competitors and also for more controversial applications like demographically targeted ads.
‘It’s exactly this sort of quasi-transactional data access that’s become a hallmark of Facebook’s business,’ Mr Biddle wrote in his article.
This approach, he proposed, allows the firm ‘to plausibly deny that it ever sells your data while still leveraging it for revenue.’
On their engineering blog, Facebook assert that the Actionable Insights program has been developed in accordance ‘with the principles of privacy by design.’
These include, they explain, the aggregation and de-identification of user information before it is shared with third parties.
In spite of this, one Actionable Insights case study allegedly highlighted how an unspecified US mobile network provider used the program to target ads at a specific racial demographic.
Another reported how Facebook data had been used to create ‘lookalike audiences’ to attempt to discriminate between users with good and poor credit ratings.
Facebook is said to have applied user data to actively help partner firms target adverts — for example, at specific racial demographics (Pictured: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking during the keynote of the F8 Facebook Developer Conference in California on April 30, 2019)
Lookalike audiences help firms attempt to identify target customers based on apparent similarities to a reference demographic — such as, for example, their existing consumer base.
As Facebook themselves describe the concept, a lookalike audience ‘is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers.’
According to the Intercept, however, the Facebook documents highlighted how a client was helped to narrow the reach of its Facebook adverts based on predicted credit scores.
By generating reference profiles of social media users with high and low credit scores, Facebook data scientists could target the ads at users whose profiles matched the desired reference profile.
This approach could also be used to try and exclude certain demographics from particular advertisements and offers.
The extent to which this process can successfully identify given demographics, however, is not certain.
University of California, Berkeley privacy scholar Chris Hoofnagle told the Intercept that such an inscrutable, speculative approach to consumer rating has ‘worrying implications’.
‘We’re going to move to a world where you won’t know how to act,’ Professor Hoofnagle said.
Contradicting the anonymous source, a Facebook spokesperson told the MailOnline that: ‘We do not, nor have we ever, rated people’s credit worthiness for Actionable Insights or across ads and Facebook does not use people’s credit information in how we show ads.’
FACEBOOK’S PRIVACY DISASTERS
December 2018: Facebook comes under fire after a bombshell report discovered the firm allowed over 150 companies, including Netflix, Spotify and Bing, to access unprecedented amounts of user data, such as private messages.
Some of these ‘partners’ had the ability to read, write, and delete Facebook users’ private messages and to see all participants on a thread.
It also allowed Microsoft’s search engine, known as Bing, to see the name of all Facebook users’ friends without their consent.
Amazon was allowed to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and Yahoo could view streams of friends’ posts.
As of last year, Sony, Microsoft, and Amazon could all obtain users’ email addresses through their friends.
September 2018: Facebook disclosed that it had been hit by its worst ever data breach, affecting 50 million users – including those of Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Attackers exploited the site’s ‘View As’ feature, which lets people see what their profiles look like to other users.
Facebook says it has found no evidence ‘so far’ that hackers broke into third-party apps after a data breach exposed 50 million users (stock image)
The unknown attackers took advantage of a feature in the code called ‘Access Tokens,’ to take over people’s accounts, potentially giving hackers access to private messages, photos and posts – although Facebook said there was no evidence that had been done.
The hackers also tried to harvest people’s private information, including name, sex and hometown, from Facebook’s systems.
Facebook said it doesn’t yet know if information from the affected accounts has been misused or accessed, and is working with the FBI to conduct further investigations.
However, Mark Zuckerberg assured users that passwords and credit card information was not accessed.
As a result of the breach, the firm logged roughly 90 million people out of their accounts earlier today as a security measure.
March 2018: Facebook made headlines earlier this year after the data of 87 million users was improperly accessed by Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy.
The disclosure has prompted government inquiries into the company’s privacy practices across the world, and fueled a ‘#deleteFacebook’ movement among consumers.
Communications firm Cambridge Analytica had offices in London, New York, Washington, as well as Brazil and Malaysia.
The company boasts it can ‘find your voters and move them to action’ through data-driven campaigns and a team that includes data scientists and behavioural psychologists.
‘Within the United States alone, we have played a pivotal role in winning presidential races as well as congressional and state elections,’ with data on more than 230 million American voters, Cambridge Analytica claims on its website.
The company profited from a feature that meant apps could ask for permission to access your own data as well as the data of all your Facebook friends.
The data firm suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix (pictured), after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that Cambridge Analytica had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump
This meant the company was able to mine the information of 87 million Facebook users even though just 270,000 people gave them permission to do so.
This was designed to help them create software that can predict and influence voters’ choices at the ballot box.
The data firm suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that Cambridge Analytica had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump.
This information is said to have been used to help the Brexit campaign in the UK.
It has also suffered several previous issues.
In 2013, Facebook disclosed a software flaw that exposed 6 million users’ phone numbers and email addresses to unauthorized viewers for a year, while a technical glitch in 2008 revealed confidential birth-dates on 80 million Facebook users’ profiles.
The Actionable Insights program, presented as being primarily intended to address mobile connectivity issues, was announced by Facebook on a post on the social media firm’s engineering blog, Code, on August 10, 2018.
‘People connect to Facebook from many parts of the world,’ Facebook spokesperson Vincent Gonguet wrote.’
By analysing information from sources like Facebook, population density maps, LiDAR, or satellite imagery, we are able to help the ecosystem better understand the state of connectivity.’
‘The analytics tools in Market Insights can help manufacturers and operators define product and service offerings for a particular audience,’ Mr Gonguet wrote of the program’s secondary component.
‘Partners can use this to inform their ad campaigns, including ads on Facebook,’ he added.
According to the Intercept, Facebook assert that Actionable Insights is not gathering any data from user devices that wasn’t already being collected.
Instead, the program is just repackaging this data in new ways, they said.
