In case you haven’t been in touch with what is happening in the social media world, the news is that Facebook collects a lot of data about their users. The simple explanation is that the organization uses it to make money. The organization does not sell the data per se, but access to the News Feed of the user. This in turn results for targeted advertising which is big business for Facebook.
The company reported advertising revenue of $40 billion last year, and it’s only going to keep growing. All of this came forward through the Cambridge Analytica scandal that got hands on 87 million Facebook user account without their permission.
Facebook sells the user access to the advertisers, it does not sell the user data to advertisers. Many outside businesses can collect your data if you give them the permission. You can visit “Settings” on Facebook and under “General” you will see an option to “Download a copy of your Facebook data.” Click that. This will give you all of the data Facebook has collected about you, from private messages to photos to your search history.
Under “Settings” you can also click “Ads,” which will bring you to an “Ad Preferences” that includes the interests Facebook thinks you have (and advertisers use to target you), and other information they might use to target you (e.g. the type of phone you use).
You can remove interests or information from this page that isn’t relevant or that you don’t want Facebook using to target you. However, Facebook does not look at your messages to target you with ads, this includes their other forums like Whatsapp and Instagram.
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