For years, Facebook workers have been repeating the slogan “you control who can see what on Facebook,” but the truth is entirely different. While you can somehow control what other users see from your profile, Facebook is the one who knows and sees everything.
Although Facebook assures you that all this information is needed to make it easier for other users to find you, it will be used to show you different ads.
What does Facebook track about me?
As soon as you open a profile on Facebook, you provide a lot of information – from name and surname, date of birth to phone number and email.
Facebook also offers you to fill in other fields such as school, workplace, city where you were born and where you currently live, are you in a relationship. In this address, you currently live and provide information about other profiles on social networks. They know what your face looks like, who your partner is, and what your interests are. Whenever you log in to your profile, Facebook tracks how much time you spend logged in, where you logged in from, the places you visited. It also remembers all the pages, profiles, and hashtags you use and who you communicate with. If you loaded the entire phone book to make it easier to connect with other users, Facebook remembers that as well. And that means you’ve endangered the privacy of your contacts who may not be on Facebook or didn’t want to share their phone number with Facebook. It’s even worse if you’ve shared your call list with Facebook because then it also knows who you’re communicating with.
Facebook tracks you when you are offline too.
Aside from the fact that Facebook knows a lot of information about you (you gave him the data yourself), Facebook monitors what you do even when you are not directly involved in the social network. For example, in its Terms of Use, which almost no one reads, Facebook added the sentence, “We receive information about your online and offline activities and purchases from a third party who has the right to give us information about you.” So he will use the data of individual sellers who will “let him know” that you have logged in to their Wi-Fi network when visiting their shopping center.
Should I care that Facebook collects my data?
Although Facebook has been offering its users the opportunity to download the data that they have voluntarily submitted to that social network for years, only a few people have used this opportunity. Many users were surprised by the pile of data that Facebook packs into an archive file. The “Facebook Friends” category is exciting because here, you can find every person you ever added as your friend, as well as the exact date when it happened. Here you can also find any friend requests that you have “ignored” or “rejected.”
If you’ve also used Facebook on your smartphone via the app, you’ve probably given Facebook access to your contacts, call list, and text messages as well. iPhone users will only find contacts from their smartphone under “Contact Info.” Still, Android users (who were a little wider in giving access to Facebook) will find a bunch of their text messages in this category (even the ones you deleted from your phone) as well as a call list. They will be amazed by those who have changed their mobile phone numbers over the years. Facebook hasn’t forgotten anything, even though you did.
If you delete your Facebook account, no one can tell you that all your data is deleted. So you should delete everything manually by yourself.
