Author: Lowell Heddings / Source: How-To Geek
Tech publications are screaming today that giving Facebook your phone number for 2FA allows them to target you for ads. But this misses a bigger point: Facebook is using your phone number to target ads whether you give it to them willingly or not.
In fact, the problem gets much worse.
Researchers have been able to prove that Facebook allows personally identifiable information, like your phone number, to be used to target you based on shadow profiles of information that they build—profiles that you cannot see and have no control over.So yes, if you give your phone number to Facebook to help secure your account, Facebook will also use it to target you for ads. But if you don’t give them your phone number, they will still use your phone number to target you for ads. And there’s nothing you can do (except delete Facebook).
What’s This Now?
Researchers at Northeastern and Princeton universities, working with Gizmodo reporters, just released a troubling report that proves that Facebook is giving advertisers access to your “shadow contact” information.
What this means is that even if you don’t want Facebook to allow advertisers to target you by your phone number… Facebook is still finding a way to let advertisers target you by your phone number and other personal details. This is even true if you literally don’t give Facebook your phone number. If you gave Facebook a fake email account when you signed up, behind the scenes, they know what your real email account is.
If you gave Facebook your phone number for Two-Factor Authentication, they are using that phone number to allow advertisers to target you. And even if you used app-based two-factor instead of SMS, they still most likely have your real phone number to target ads to you.
So you might think the details you gave Facebook are what they are using to target ads, but that’s not the full story. And there’s no way to prohibit Facebook from targeting your phone number even if you didn’t give it to them.
Hold On, What Does Targeting Ads Even Mean?
When an advertiser wants to buy an ad on Facebook—or anywhere else—they want to only pay to show that ad to the group of people most likely to actually click on that ad, because buying ads is really expensive. So Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, all provide targeting options that let you try to find the ideal audience for your ads.
So if you’re Nintendo and you want to advertise your SNES Classic, you might use Facebook’s targeting options to only show the ad to people that are the right age to have played the original as children, and then further refine it by people who have shown an interest in SNES. If you were only doing a limited launch, maybe you restrict your ads to just the country, state, or city that you are launching in. Now your ad…
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