Privacy News Report: Facebook Users Are Tracked by an Average of 2,230 Advertisers

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

Content source

https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/296305/report-facebook-users-are-tracked-by-an-average-of-2230-advertisers

A troubling new report from the consumer advocates at Consumer Reports shows that our online tracking problems are much more than expected: The average Facebook user is tracked by 2,230 advertisers and personal data brokers, and over 186,000 companies are tracking Facebook users overall.

“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,” Consumer Reports’ Jon Keegan writes. “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. Participants downloaded an archive of the previous three years of their data from their Facebook settings, then provided it to Consumer Reports.”

As is the case with the recent new Outlook controversy, sure, we all know that we’re being tracked online, but it’s another thing entirely to be confronted with the unbelievable scope of these activities. Consumer Reports says that this study was a unique chance to examine how someone’s personal information secretly travels between these ad/data broker companies and Facebook parent company Meta using a method called server-to-server tracking. And much of this tracking occurs outside of Meta’s apps, including even physical retail stores, as many retailers are among the advertisers participating in Meta’s system.

Report: Facebook Users Are Tracked by an Average of 2,230 Advertisers

A troubling new report from the consumer advocates at Consumer Reports shows that our online tracking problems are much more than expected.

www.thurrott.com

 

[enaph]

 

[Kubla]

They have been doing this for a long time, I used to use a very powerful firewall called xSOS, it could show every single ip address that you connect to when you open a web site, then allow you to block all the addresses you did not want to connect to. Unfortunately it must have been too powerful as the company abruptly disappeared from the internet and the developer stopped answering e-mails.

Using this software I was surprised at how many sites connected you to Facebook ip addresses so you are likely being tracked by Facebook even if you don't use Facebook.

Probably a good idea to get a blocklist of Facebook domains, or use an extension blocker, not sure but maybe Ublock origin can do it, another extension called Freedom that is supposed to do it. You can use a DNS Filter like NextDNS to block them, there is also a parental control software called Canopy that can block them, I use Blackfog to block them now..