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Ignorance may be bliss for Facebook's users. About 74 percent of adults in the US who use Facebook didn't know the social network keeps a list of their interests and traits for ad targeting, says a study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.
About half of Facebook users said they weren't comfortable that the company compiled this information.
The world's largest social network came under fire in 2018 for a series of scandals over data privacy and security. The episodes caused concern about whether Facebook does enough to let users know what information it tracks and how it uses the data.
Facebook knows your age, gender and location, along with what you post, the pages you like and the businesses you check into on the social network. All that information helps the company determine what ads to show its 2.3 billion users.
Facebook users can view their "ad preferences" page to see what the social network thinks their interests are and why they're seeing a given ad. This list can include users' political leanings, hobbies and even the type of smartphone they use. Facebook users can also remove an interest from that list to change the type of ads they see on the social network.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday January 20 2019, @07:48PM
I don't miss Prodigy. They shared the patronizing paternalism of their parent company, Sears. (I'd like to see Sears stop that, preferably without going bankrupt, but if the only choices are alive and patronizing, or bankrupt, I'll take bankrupt.) I know from personal experience that Prodigy spied on its users. I tried writing a complaint, and was disconnected. I got back on, surfed around a bit to check that the connection was good, and tried again. Midway through the complaint, disconnected. Hmm. Tried a 3rd time, and everything seemed fine until I tried writing the complaint, then, click! Disconnected again! Never had so much trouble staying connected-- the amount of droppage I was getting was unprecedented. And usually when there's connection troubles, the connection degrades before dropping. This was an abrupt transition from working perfectly to dropped. So I cut them off. Never dialed in again, ignored all their mail about being seriously delinquent in paying for service I was not using (they had that crap that you couldn't quit them unless you gave them 30 days written notice, one of the stunts AoL also tried), their dire warnings that I would be cut off, and finally, after a year or two they gave up.
Next to that Prodigy and AoL crap, Facebook is positively benign.
I never used Geocities, I always ran my own servers. But around 2 years ago, the ISP I'm stuck using (Time Warner/Spectrum) quietly started blocking ports 80 and 443. My web server became invisible, and no one at the ISP seemed to know why, suggested the problem was my end. Sometimes they will speculate that if they are blocking those ports, it's for your own good. You wouldn't want to get infected with a VIRUS, would you? Seemed I had no choice but to use a web hosting service, or not have a web site.