Facebook targets users with location-based adverts even if they block the company from accessing GPS on their phones, turn off location history in the app, hide their work location on their profile and never use the company’s “check in” feature, according to an investigation published this week.
There is no combination of settings that users can enable to prevent their location data from being used by advertisers to target them, according to the privacy researcher Aleksandra Korolova. “Taken together,” Korolova says, “Facebook creates an illusion of control rather than giving actual control over location-related ad targeting, which can lead to real harm.”
Facebook users can control to an extent how much information they give the company about their location. [...] But while users can decide to give more information to Facebook, Korolova revealed they cannot decide to stop the social network knowing where they are altogether nor can they stop it selling the ability to advertise based on that knowledge.They say that you should hesitate to ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence, but there is no incompetence surrounding this latest revelation: Facebook themselves straight-up admit that they use "IP and other information such as check-ins and current city from your profile" to built these shadow profiles of users' location data, even after those users refused to grant Facebook permission to build a profile of their location data. This is clearly malicious. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Google does not do this. Microsoft does not do this; Apple and Amazon do not do this. There is no "all sides" argument to be made by WIRED magazine, or any of Facebook's other Definers Media-fueled defenders.
Only Facebook is this shady. Facebook is the problem, here.
To say that this most likely contravenes multiple provisions of the GDPR would be something of an understatement; whether U.S. laws currently prohibit this sort of "shadow profiling" is anyone's guess, although I'm sure the new U.S. Congress will be looking into that question, among others. If you're waiting for government regulators to get a handle on the full breadth and depth of Facebook's scumminess, though... you should probably stop waiting, and just delete Facebook, already.