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Facebook is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information

posted by martyb on Thursday September 27 2018, @07:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the shadow-file-brokers dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://gizmodo.com/facebook-is-giving-advertisers-access-to-your-shadow-co-1828476051:

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn't hand over at all, but that was collected from other people's contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I've come to call "shadow contact information." I managed to place an ad in front of Alan Mislove by targeting his shadow profile. This means that the junk email address that you hand over for discounts or for shady online shopping is likely associated with your account and being used to target you with ads.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @09:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @09:20PM (#741044)

    That's been a theory for many years. I don't have an account but my info would be available when they purchase bulk credit records or pull in public records. As they're matching the data to existing accounts they can create shadow accounts for those without matches. Another example would be collecting address books from users with the mobile app. Just a couple of obvious ways, I'm sure there are many more.