Data collection happens everywhere every time nowadays. In here i’m not referring to business data, i’m referring to you personal data. What is privacy? Why are all the websites including their privacy policies but none of the users understand. Data collection happens from business to government sectors from the White house to the CCP from search engine, web browsing, to social media and to shopping experience. The explanation from parties who acquire data is to provides a better experiences to the users, or to ensure the safety of the civilisation. The real purpose for businesses is to monetise and for the government is to make sure everything is in their order.
If you ever watch the Westworld the entire storyline is exactly what happens to the cyber world today. The corporations are predicting controlling the people, just like what happens exactly in the internet world.
Surprise not, our every single movement in the net has been recorded and analysed and monetised. This is why tech giant corporations are trying to be part of every single aspect in our life just to make sure that they can understand you so much. Google home and Amazon Alexa package it as your most personal assistant to make your life better, for every single word that you have said, they are listening and they are predicting as well.
Why does Facebook know what to show to you?
It all started with your engagement towards the content that you have watched and response. But it realised that gathering the data from Facebook.com alone isn’t sufficient to know precisely what you want to see. In such, any products that are owned by Facebook become their data harvesting platform as well, for instant WhatsApp. It’s not officially Facebook mention that your conversation will be used by its parents company, but if you are keen to know if they do, you can try it yourself with an experiment.
Think of a topic that you will not expect yourself to see in your newsfeed. Let say you are currently not interested in properties, put this random topic up with your friends on WhatsApp talking about buying properties. Keep observing your Facebook news feed and you will see some properties ads appear.
Understand what data is used to show you ads by Facebook
After being pressured by the European government. Most of the tech giants are very cautious towards handling and explaining their privacy message to the public. https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/25/17393766/facebook-google-gdpr-lawsuit-max-schrems-europe
Facebook has its page to explain how their ads work – https://www.facebook.com/ads/about/?entry_product=ad_preferences. In short, they explain to you how to show their ads to you.
To understand why the ads appear in your news feed you can check out why Facebook thinks the recommendation is correct in Facebook’s ads preference page https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/.
Personally, i’ve doubt on what’s being upfront by Facebook. In Facebook we are still inside their games, the technology of behavior prediction can be very vast and indirect. After all, the tracking may create a better experience for you to use the apps, but the ways how they collect your data and how it manipulates your decision is getting creepier.