Data mining is the process of using algorithms to extract useful information from huge sets of data. Basically, companies use software to look into large batches of data in order to learn more about their customers, develop better marketing strategies and increase sales.

Here is a good example of data mining I came across –

Grocery Stores: A lot of these stores offer free membership cards to customers. These cards give customers access to member only discounts along with other little benefits and can be quite tempting. The real purpose of these cards though, is to make it easy for the stores to track their customers’ purchasing habits. Who is buying what, when they are buying it and at what price they are buying it. This allows the stores to offer targeted coupons to customers, analyse purchasing habits, predict when there will be a high demand for a product with the help of the aforementioned purchasing habits, manipulate prices and so on. Target, a major United States supermarket chain even managed to accurately identify a teenage girl’s pregnancy with this process. Like, I don’t even know anymore.

In most cases, when you sign up for a website or an application you sign away the rights to your data. This is also mentioned in their Privacy Policy and is the reason why it is sometimes recommended to read the Privacy Policy and even the Terms and Conditions briefly before signing up for a service or website you are sceptical about.

Facebook uses multiple methods to track you. It collects information about various different aspects of your activities through its sophisticated applications to better identify you for ad networks. Here I am going to be listing some of its processes for collecting your data. Further down the article I am also going to be explaining ways to reduce the amount of data it collects through these methods.

All this comes under Data Mining. After analysing the vast amount of data it collects, Facebook creates a list of your engagement patterns, interests, demographic, career and more. This helps advertisers on the platform who it sells this data to, provide targeted advertisements.

Your Social Activity: This should have been obvious by now. By signing up for the service you are essentially giving Facebook access to everything you do on the website. This means your photos, videos, messages, people you have friended, pages you have liked, events you are interested in, groups you have joined and so on. It keeps track of all your activity on the website itself and analyses most of it to serve you advertisements.

This is also applicable to other applications which the company owns, notably: Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Portal.

Connected Applications: When you log into other applications/websites with your Facebook profile, you not only give that application access to your Facebook data, you also give Facebook access to all your activities in that application. The company collects information like why you use that app, your friends who also use it, your hardware, your devices and so on. This also applies for websites you log into with your Facebook account.

Your Location Data: All applications provided by the company request access to your device’s location data. The company keeps track of literally every move you make, building a precise location history and using it to serve you relevant advertisements.

Your Mouse Movements: Facebook tracks your mouse movements on the website, how long you hovered over an advertisement, whether you clicked on it, how long you read a post before scrolling and so on. It uses this data to provide engagement insights for advertisements and determine your interests.

Your Devices: It collects information about all the devices you own, your hardware, operating system, software versions, battery levels, signal strength, storage space and much, much more. If you are wondering how it might use this data, here is what Uber concluded after analysing this kind of data –

Your Text Messages and Phone Calls: On Android, it can also keep a log of all your text messages and phone calls. It requests access to this feature and for users who do not care about the silly little popups on their phones, tough shit; they should have paid more attention.

Your Web Activity: To understand how Facebook tracks you on the web and uses your browsing history to display you relevant advertisements, we need to learn how Facebook advertisements work in the first place. For that, you need to scroll down.

Re-targeted Advertisements

Re-targeted ads are displayed in accordance with your browser’s history and your web activity. I will be going a little in depth into how re-targeted ads work here –

Cookies

You might have seen the “Allow Cookies?” pop up on a number of websites these days. I’ll get into why you started seeing the above message in the first place, later on in this article but here is what you need to know about cookies –

• Cookies are small snippets of data that a website stores on your computer in your browser and can later retrieve.
• The pieces of information in a cookie are stored as name-value pairs.

For example, let’s say when you visit Amazon, it stores a Main User ID, a Session ID and so on. Hence there will a section with the name as “Main User ID” and the value as the Main User ID which has been generated, another section with the name as “Session ID” and the value as the Session ID which has been generated and so on.

Cookies inherently, aren’t bad. It’s the ways they can be used that makes them a vital part of understanding your privacy on the internet. A couple of examples of ways cookies can be genuinely helpful for both the website and the customer –

Storing User Preferences: Cookies can be used to store the customisation preferences of a visitor who is not logged in.

Determining Unique Visitor Count: A unique User ID can be stored on the visitor’s machine when they access a website for the first time. When they go to the website again, it can check the user’s cookies to see if they have already been assigned a unique User ID. If they have, it means that they are a returning user and are not to be counted amongst the number of unique visitors the website receives.

Storing Shopping Carts: Cookies can contain the ID of the products you have added to your cart. Hence, if you close the website before checking out and visit it again later, it will have your cart items saved.

Re-targeting

Re-targeting is a way to serve ads to people across the web who have already visited your website. There are two main types of re-targeting campaigns; I will be taking the example of the e-commerce website Amazon to explain these –

Pixel-Based: This is the most common type of re-targeting. When you visit Amazon, the website places a cookie in your browser with IDs of the products you browsed. When you go around the web and come across an advertisement space purchased by Amazon, it runs code to access the cookie data stored in your browser and displays an advertisement for the products you have already taken a look at.

List-Based: This works if you already have an account on Amazon. Instead of storing the products you browsed in a cookie, it stores them in a database with your email linked to it. When you go to Facebook and come across an advertisement spot purchased by Amazon, it runs code to access that database this time. It matches the email linked to your Facebook account with the email with Amazon’s database, thus gaining access to the products you have browsed. It then displays an advertisement for these products.

Ad Networks

Whenever you are displayed an advertisement, there are two parties involved. The website on which the advertisement is displayed is called the Publisher. The company whose advertisement is displayed is called the Advertiser.

The job of an Ad Network is to bring these two together. An Ad Network gets in touch with a bunch of Publishers and determines the amount of ad space available. Advertisers can then sign up on the Ad Network and select how much they are willing to pay to show advertisements on various publishers/networks like Facebook (via Facebook Exchange). This is called creating a campaign.

Facebook Exchange (FBX)

Facebook Exchange is a real-time bidding platform which enables Facebook to sell ad slots to the highest bidders in fractions of a second. To understand how this works, here is a timeline of events –

• Amazon is signed up with an Ad Network. The Ad Network is partnered with Facebook and has access to Facebook Exchange.
• You visit Amazon. Amazon drops a cookie on your machine which stores the products you browsed. Along with the product list, it also stores a unique User ID given to them by Facebook (via the Ad Network). Ideally, when this User ID is requested from the Facebook’s servers to be stored on your machine, you are already logged into Facebook, thus allowing the product data to be directly associated with your Facebook account.
• Amazon then provides the cookie data to the Ad Network which in turn provides it to Facebook.
• When you come across an ad space, Facebook checks the unique User ID it has generated for you and cross-references it with the one provided by the Ad Network to see if you are indeed the same individual.
• If it is, Facebook puts a request on Facebook Exchange saying “Here’s a user you might be interested in. How much are you willing to pay to show them an advertisement?”
• The Ad Network then makes a bid for an advertisement on behalf of Amazon, with the highest bidder winning like in any other auction and you see an advertisement.

In re-targeted advertisements for most other websites, the Publisher DOES NOT know what is inside of the re-targeted ad since the ad content comes from the Ad Network.

In Facebook’s case, the advertisement is coming directly from Facebook and Facebook effectively DOES know what’s inside it, as well as every other site you’ve accessed that has an agreement with them (which is a lot). In fact, Facebook doesn’t just know about your interactions with advertising partners. Facebook knows about every page you visit that includes a Facebook Like button because that Like button is served from the Facebook servers, which means a communication happens there, along with your Facebook ID.

You might be thinking “if all my data is used for is to serve me advertisements, it’s not as harmful as it sounds. I could just use an Ad Blocker and be done with it.” And that is where I am going to tell you that it is way more harmful than it sounds.

See, the first issue is that no company should store this much data and know what Facebook does about its users. Can people really trust anyone with this much information about their private life?

The second issue is that Facebook hasn’t been at all responsible with user data.

The company has been at the centre of various scandals throughout the past year. The Cambridge Analytica being one of the bigger ones.

Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal

To summarise, in 2016 Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm with the help of Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist at Cambridge University, developed a Facebook application called “This Is Your Digital Life”. The firm then organised an informed consent process (basically a survey) for research in which approximately 270,000 users would agree to complete a survey (see? I told you) only for academic use.

However, Facebook API allowed the researchers to gain access to the data of the friends of these 270,000 users as well. This turned the number from 270,000 to over 87 million users. That’s a big number.

The key part in this whole situation is that the firm Cambridge Analytica was founded by Steve Bannon, the senior adviser to Trump who also became the White House Chief Strategist when Trump won the Presidency. It was Bannon who approached the Trump Campaign with the data gained through this research experiment. That’s a big oopsie. #SubscribeToPewdiepie

Here is an article by Vox on this topic –

Here are a few more links on the misuse of user data by Facebook –

I will be going through various methods of controlling your data in this section. Controlling what Facebook knows about you begins with controlling the shady advertisement tactics of the website.

Advertisements

The Washington Post compiled a list of 98 data points Facebook uses to target ads to you. Here they are –

To control these data points and reduce the amount of data Facebook collects, we are going to have to take a dive into the advertisement settings of the website. Here I am going to be explaining how to navigate to these settings and what each of them control.

Also, the only reason Facebook even provided access to these settings is because of GDPR. Just keep that in mind as we go through them.

Click on the “Ads” section in your settings panel.

The first three sections on this page are about the data Facebook has collected on you by tracking you across the web. The remaining two are about actually disabling some of this tracking.

Connected Applications

Whenever you log into a website with your Facebook account, click on one of those quizzes on your timeline or sign into an application on your smartphone with Facebook, you are basically giving a third party access to your Facebook data. This in turn also allows Facebook to collect information the third party has on you.

Here I am going to be addressing the way of managing applications connected to your account.

There easiest way to access this section is by navigating to your base settings panel and clicking on “Apps and websites” in the sidebar. The page is divided into three main categories of applications –

• Data Access: Active
• Data Access: Expired
• Data Access: Removed

Preferences

In the Preferences section of this page, you can turn off a few annoying features.

Apps, websites and games: This setting basically allows you to log into different websites and applications with your Facebook account. I wouldn’t recommend turning this off since it is sometimes faster and easier to log in with your Facebook account instead of manually signing up. However the key part is choosing where to sign up with your Facebook and where to do it manually.

Game and App Notifications: Oh thank fuck for this. This stops people from sending you game and app requests. Turn this off if you don’t play any games on Facebook or use any applications like that fake makeup stuff. These apps request a lot of data from your profile and make a ton of profit by selling your information.

Old versions of Facebook for mobile: This setting is a part of controlling what you share with friends. This references posts before Facebook provided you with the option of selecting the audience for every single post. With this setting, you can select who can see your extremely old content.

Your Location History

Facebook uses the location settings on your smartphone to create a precise location history of you every day. Click on the “Location” tab in the left and you’ll be presented with the page below –

Click on “View your location history” to see what location data Facebook has on you. It neatly displays your recent locations on a map and you can see for yourself how it literally knows your every move.

Turn off Location Access for Facebook in your phone settings.

Face Recognition

Facebook also analyses the photos you post or get tagged in to better learn about your face. It then uses this information to identify you in other photos and videos. You should turn this off in the settings.

General Data Protection Regulation is the European Union privacy law which replaced the European Data Protection Directive (1995) on May 25th, 2018. It was approved  in the April of 2016 and provided companies with more than 2 years to adapt their products to the new regulations

The law applies to any business which processes the personal data of EU citizens. Facebook falls into this category and hence had to provide users access to a vast number of settings never seen before. I am not going to be going into the specifics since that deserves its own post but the basic intent of GDPR is to protect the personal data of EU citizens. To do this, it provides them with certain rights, the most important two being:

Right to Access: Users should have access to information about what data a company has on them, how it is using that information and where it is using that information.

Right to be Forgotten: This entitles users to have their personal data be deleted from a company and stop it from being further used and distributed by third parties.

So the fact that Facebook has provided its users access to these settings is not out of good will. It’s because they are legally required to comply or face penalties. And this can be seen because since the day Facebook has finally revealed all the data it collects, it has been in hot water. No company would willingly shoot itself in the foot. To be fair, you never know with corporate but I am certain about this one.

Facebook is a fantastic idea implemented by a terrible company. Social Networks have become a necessity today for keeping up with the people in our lives. Sure they are addicting for some but you can’t deny the important service they provide: Providing you access the events around the world by creating direct interactions with people from all walks of life. And that makes them more of a public necessity than a luxury. So until someone whose integrity is more than their desire for money, decides to take one for the team and build a better product, these things will keep on controlling us and our daily lives.

Also, for anyone who is reading from the USA, Hindsight is Bernie 2020.