I’m sadly on Facebook on the odd occasion. I keep in touch with my sister and a few friends there so haven’t been able to delete my account.
When I was on the app this morning, I noticed a massive increase in ads being shoved in front of my face. Naturally, I reported every single ad as spam. And then did some digging to see if I could work out why I was seeing so many ads.
The list in the image above is the beginning of the list of advertisers who have uploaded my data to Facebook. The list is insanely long. But what’s even scarier is that most of these companies have no reason at all to have my data.
What this means is pretty simple:
- there are plenty of people out there who have my data and are selling it to the highest bidder.
- many companies are sharing my data amongst their other or affiliated companies.
- there is a tonne of illegal use of people’s data going on out there.
I’m pretty annoyed at this. And I’ve now deleted my Facebook profile permanently. I’ll just have to communicate with people the old school way.