You can help us investigate the monitoring marketing using Facebook data: Here’s how

Observer marketers change how you follow online, and coding joins consumer reports for investigation. But we need to help you.

Targeup informed intensive reports on Meta Pixel (formerly Facebook Pixel) and other pixels units last year, and revealed that organizations – from hospitals to crises to hot lines to tax deposit companies to the US Department of Education – sent sensitive data to Facebook. We have paid Congress investigations, data breach notifications, and collective lawsuit. Dozens of organizations removed pixels of definition from their websites as a result. We were able to do all this because the audiences shared their data with us, through our “Facebook Pixel Hunt” study in partnership with Mozilla Rally. These donations allow us to see how real people’s information has ended in the hands of Facebook while browsing the web.

Now, we need to help you again. Instead of relying on pixel units tracking – which is the web traffic that coding, consumer reports can follow you, others use tools in the browser – may now follow you in a way that cannot be fully detected by users and their devices.

It is called “tracking a servant to a server”, which means that when companies get some information about you, their servers send them directly to another company server. Privacy research tools often depend on some signals from a computer, mobile device or browser to detect tracking. However, “tracking a servant to a servant” is not emitted from any of these types of signs.

We need a new way to know companies that communicate with your data, and we have a reason to believe that starting what they share with Facebook will get us there. This is where you come.

Share your Facebook data with us

We need to help you know what companies have sent to Facebook about you, including what they sent using server tracking to the server. (We will also see the data sent through Meta Pixel.) We will cross you by downloading your data from Facebook and sharing it with us. Next, consumer reports will use two specific parts of your data file:

• Your Facebook events. These “events” that have been reported on Facebook include other companies, including companies whose Facebook servers have something that you have done – for example, if you move on a button on the company’s mobile phone application, or added an element to a honest or your wish list, or bought something in its actual store. Companies that use this feature will recognize them as a Facebook transfers programming interface.

• The audiences allocated to Facebook that include you. These are email address lists or phone numbers that companies are downloading on Facebook. This Facebook announces as a means of companies to target their ads for people already in their “current fans” or if Facebook thinks that you are similar to these people. For example, the company can download the list of subscribers to the newsletter.

How to contribute

The entire process should take you only from 5 to 10 minutes. It includes downloading some data from Facebook.

Step 1: Subscribe as a volunteer

• Please visit the volunteer registration page on Facebook Transform Facebook.

• Use the model on the page to register as a volunteer.

• Follow the full instructions, including how to download your Facebook data, in the Google Form that you will see after registration. These instructions will also be sent to you via email.

Step 2: Fill in Google Form and download your Facebook data

• The Google model will order your email address and to read through the approval form. You will agree to share the data it owns Facebook about you but not your personal content, photos or messages. Any definition information will be kept in secret. We dig exactly what data is collected below.
• Next, it will guide you by downloading a sub -set of your data from Facebook and downloading it to the form.
• He will ask you some optional reconnaissance questions and give you space to share any notes.
• Finally, send your data so that researchers and journalists can in the brand reports and consumers use them to investigate the new methods that companies follow using you. That’s it!

Who should contribute?

everyone! We mean that. The more people who help, the more we understand about this new tracking technique. Even if you haven’t logged on Facebook for years, you can help.

Although we will not know the demographic information about you, we encourage you in particular to contribute to your data if you fall into one category below, because digital advertisers strongly target members of these groups (so we are likely to get high -quality data) and because we are really interested in seeing the names of companies that target these groups.

• Parents with 18 -year -old children or less
• Anyone over the age of 65
• Women between the ages of 18 and 35
• People who have connected their Facebook account with a financial service or a healthcare service (for example, if you are using your Facebook account to log in)

What if I don’t have a Facebook account?

We already know that Meta Pixel collects information about you even if you don’t have a Facebook account. The same applies here. Even if you don’t have a Facebook account, you may still have Facebook data about you – but you will not be able to download it using our instructions for this investigation. However, we are really interested in looking at this in the future.

If you have never created a Facebook account before and you want to help us investigate the data that Facebook I have, send a note to [email protected] or [email protected]And we will contact you if we have a follow -up.

What data is collected

Consumer reports:

• The name of the company that sent joint information about you to Facebook
• Dates and times that have been shared with the information that has been shared
• Joint data type IDs, such as when running or making a purchase
• Your postal code, from optional survey
• Whether you use certain privacy tools while browsing online, from optional survey
• The name and image associated with your Google account. Google Forms collects this data in order to allow users to download their data safely, but consumer reports will not use this information and will not link it with Facebook data that you download in any way. You can also avoid sharing this information by creating a new Google account for the purpose of downloading your data.
• Consumer reports will hide data so that you cannot extract any specific data for you, and will store your Facebook data separately from any of your personal information.

If you are a Facebook user, consumer reports will not collect your posts, including messages or images – the download guide explains how to get the data that Facebook has without downloading your personal content in this process. In addition, even if you upload the personal content at the end, consumer reports will only withdraw the data mentioned above for this study.

You will be able to contribute to moving forward, but consumer reports will start analyzing data on August 14, and we will look at publishing stories in the coming months.

We hope you can join us. We are excited to see what we can find.

Credits: Cisi Wei, Maria Puertas

As published here

Photo by Roman Martiniok on non -earthquakes