Facebook Shadow Profiles

Luis Aguiar, Christian Peukert, Maximilian Schäfer () and Hannes Ullrich
Additional contact information
Christian Peukert: UNIL - Université de Lausanne = University of Lausanne
Maximilian Schäfer: Yale University [New Haven], University of Bologna

Working Papers from HAL

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.

Keywords: General Economics (econ.GN); FOS: Economics and business (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-03-08
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Working Paper: Facebook Shadow Profiles (2022)
Working Paper: Facebook Shadow Profiles (2022)
Working Paper: Facebook Shadow Profiles (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-04495641

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2202.04131

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