Facebook sucks for privacy, but how good are advertisers at targeting me?

A lot has been recently said about Facebook’s disregard for user’s data privacy. This is as stories are routinely coming out about their business model of collecting user information, and selling this off to advertisers and worse.

To test out the value of this collected information, Preetish Panda gathered his dataset from Facebook, and analyzed using this in the alluvial diagram below.

The analysis notes that about 65% of the companies that bought his information would be receptive to Panda as a customer. The other companies wasted their money.

As mentioned above, around 40 percent of the companies in the list were absolutely new to me and I’m confident there’s no way I’d have shared my details with those advertisers. There’s a bunch of random companies in there — such as a weird company in the agriculture industry — that have no business targeting me or using my data.

The question still remains about how and why Facebook is sharing/selling our data to anyone that will pay for it.

Clearly, Facebook hasn’t been able to enforce its terms, and the companies (or their data partners) also didn’t bother to get consent from the targets. But, the question remains: how did they manage to get my data?

Note from Panda: You can use the ‘R’ code present in my GitHub repository to create this visualization based on your data.

SOURCE: The Next Web