Facebook users cannot avoid location-based ads, investigation finds

Facebook targets users with location-based adverts even when they block the provider from accessing GPS on their phones, power down location history inside the app, hide their job location on the profile rather than utilize company’s “check in” feature, depending on a study published immediately.

There isn’t any mixture of settings that users can enable to stop their whereabouts data from used by advertisers to focus on them, as per the privacy researcher Aleksandra Korolova. “Taken together,” Korolova says, “Facebook creates an illusion of control as opposed to giving actual treatments for location-related ad targeting, resulted in real harm.”

Facebook users can control in an extent exactly how much information they furnish the firm concerning location. At most revealing end, users might be very happy to enable “location services” for Facebook, allowing their iPhone to present ultra-precise location data to the company, or they might “check in” to shops, restaurants and theatres, telling the online social network where they can be on the sporadic basis.

But while users can decide to give more details to Facebook, Korolova revealed they can’t elect to stay away from the myspace and facebook knowing where they can be altogether nor do they stop it selling the opportunity to advertise based upon that knowledge.

Despite likely to as much trouble as you can to minimise the situation data received by the social networking, the researcher wrote, “Facebook showed me ads targeted at ‘people who live near Santa Monica’ (that’s home) or ‘people who live or were recently near Los Angeles’ (that is where I work). Moreover, I’ve seen that whenever I travel for work or pleasure, Facebook continues to monitor my location and use it to promote: a holiday to Glacier national park led to an advertisement for activities in Whitefish, Montana; a visit to Cambridge, MA, inside an ad for a business there; and also a trip to Herzliya, Israel, within a ad to get a business there.

“Some on the explanations by Facebook why My business is seeing a particular ad even mention specifically that we’re seeing the ad since i was ‘recently near their business’.”

The experience was mirrored because of the Guardian reporter Julia Carrie Wong, who discovered in April the fact that site “knows that we took reporting trips to Montana and Seattle and North park, even though Ive never allowed it to monitor me by GPS”.

Facebook tells advertisers it learns user locations from the Ip, wifi and Bluetooth data, Korolova says.

In its pitch to advertisers, Facebook says: “Local awareness ads were furnished with privacy on your mind [-] People have therapy for the present location information they give Facebook and definitely will only see ads depending on their recent location if location services are enabled for their phone.” Korolova says her findings prove that “this claim is false”.

The academic argues that Facebook has to provde the power to opt from location use entirely, “or, at least, a capacity to meaningfully specify the granularity of their use and exclude particular areas from being used”.

In 2015, according to leaked emails authored by the UK parliament, they behind a specific form of location-based advertising, which used Bluetooth “beacons” to trace users’ shopping habits without resorting to uploading GPS data, was particularly worried about appearing “scary”.

“We’re still from a precarious position of scaling without freaking people out,” wrote a Facebook product manager answerable for the location-tracking technology. “If a negative meme were to develop around Facebook Bluetooth beacons, businesses can be transformed into reticent to acknowledge them from us.”

Facebook said within a statement: “Facebook is not going to use wifi data to find out your neighborhood for ads if you have location services powered down. Carry out use IP as well as other information just like check-ins and current city from the profile. We explain this to folks, including with our Privacy Basics site and so on the About Facebook Ads site.”