My final project is surrounding our data and how it is tracked, in addition to what we are agreeing to when we use these apps and services. This includes scenarios where we know we are being tracked (like my Life360 app, which the sole purpose is to track others) and things that we may not be so aware of (like how a google search will later turn into an ad for the same thing later). I’ve notated a few examples of how information is shared across devices, and Facebook has been the most prevalent app to prove my theories in this project. Let’s get started.
For the first portion of this project, I wanted to do an experiment to see how our phones are “listening”, or simply just tracking everything we do. For this experiment, I chose a random app to download and notated what ads showed up after I downloaded my app. Would downloading the HelloFresh app start showing me ads or recipes on Instagram and Facebook? That’s essentially what happened. I downloaded the Lowe’s app and not a minute later there was an ad for Lowe’s on Instagram.
Next, I went to the Enfamil website to create a rewards account with them since my wife is due to have our son soon and we wanted to get some samples of formula. Can you guess where an ad for Enfamil showed up? That’s right, I saw an ad for Enfamil the day after I signed up for that account.
Finally, I did a search for storage containers and trash bins on Amazon. I think you get the point here and can figure out by now that what I searched on Amazon came up as an ad.
So, what do I do with this information? I found a good article on how to handle this, if you are concerned with your tracked data. Does Facebook know what I search for on Google? No. But many websites use a so-called Facebook Pixel, which gathers data about you – such as your IP address and other things – and advertisers use this data to put relevant ads on your Facebook timeline. So, the bottom line is that Facebook basically does know what you look at online. How do we stop personalized ads appearing on Facebook? Recently Facebook updated its interface on desktop and mobile. And it also launched a new tool called ‘Off-Facebook activity’. Using this you can prevent this tracking from being turned into targeted ads. Make no mistake: this does not stop the tracking, but it will mean you don’t see adverts for services and products you’ve looked at recently. You’ll see the same number of adverts, but they won’t be personalized to you. You can also find out how to block ads with these best ad-blockers.
I went to go read through the Terms of Service for Facebook, but ended up finding my way to the “Privacy Grade” on TOSDR.org, which stands for Terms of Service, Didn’t Read, along with a few other sites just for comparison (but I’ll only post the Facebook results because it’s rather lengthy). This is what I found.
So after my experiment and reviewing how my info is tracked and shared, I looked through my phone usage and picked out the main apps that I use. To summarize my project and findings, I made an infographic that outlines the top 3 points I found when looking at their term info.
