Facebook Shadow Profiles

Luis Aguiar, Christian Peukert (), Maximilian Sch\"afer and Hannes Ullrich

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We quantify Facebook's ability to build shadow profiles by tracking individuals across the web, irrespective of whether they are users of the social network. For a representative sample of US Internet users, we find that Facebook is able to track about 40 percent of the browsing time of both users and non-users of Facebook, including on privacy-sensitive domains and across user demographics. We show that the collected browsing data can produce accurate predictions of personal information that is valuable for advertisers, such as age or gender. Because Facebook users reveal their demographic information to the platform, and because the browsing behavior of users and non-users of Facebook overlaps, users impose a data externality on non-users by allowing Facebook to infer their personal information.

Date: 2022-02, Revised 2022-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-pay
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http://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.04131 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Facebook Shadow Profiles (2024)
Working Paper: Facebook Shadow Profiles (2022)
Working Paper: Facebook Shadow Profiles (2022)
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