Facebook and many other online services make money by collecting data about their users and allowing advertisers to target ads with that data. If this topic is unfamiliar to you I’ve written a primer covering the basics. It’s already a creepy concept, and when you throw in the potential for privacy violations like Facebook’s recent breach involving Cambridge Analytica you may be wondering exactly how exposed you are as a result of using these sites.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you received a monthly report from ad networks like Facebook, which told you exactly how your data was used, who used it, and what they paid? Here’s what I’m imagining:
| Advertiser | Campaign | Times Shown | Avg Price Per Impression |
|---|---|---|---|
| Casper | ages 22-35 with college level education interested in Furniture | 6 | $1.22 |
| People for Roy Moore | ages 18-99 in Alabama interested in Agriculture | 4 | $0.16 |
| Little Lord Academy | parents of children ages 04-06 interested in Autism | 4 | $0.92 |
| TOTAL | $11.64 |
There’s a lot of good information here. Your recent urge to replace your aging mattress? Maybe it was that mattress company spending heavily to get your attention. The cheddar Facebook made snooping on you and taking notes? $11.64. Let’s call that the price of Free.
What incentive, however, could Facebook and other ad networks possibly have for sharing this information with us? Well, it might bring some peace to their ongoing crisis of conscience. But if they don’t want to be more transparent with us on their own we could always make them.
Currently the gold standard of data collection is to tie the data to a unique piece of information such as an email address. Once you’ve done that, you can sell this data to ad networks like Facebook who can use that email address to look you up in their own database and add the information to their ever-growing dossier.
The recent retail initiative of emailing you a receipt is dual purpose. It’s true that buying clothes and having your receipt emailed to you is slightly better for the environment and helps businesses reduce point-of-sale overhead, but it also ties your purchase to your email. That retailer can then sell your purchase history to ad networks and make your transaction a little more lucrative for them. This already happens. If you’ve ever wondered how Facebook ads are eerily related to the things you interact with in the real world, this is one of the ways they gain visibility into your life even when you’re outside the Facebook ecosystem.
Email is just one method brick & mortar stores can use to track you. When you download a retailer’s mobile app, for example, you give them access to your unique advertiser ID provided by both Apple and Android platforms. (Facebook knows that ID as well because their mobile app is installed on your phone.) When you provide a phone number for account recovery purposes that phone number can also serve as a way to uniquely identify you. In this article we focus on stemming the flow of email-based tracking, likely the most ubiquitous method - and easiest to act on.
Since the technical underpinnings of this surveillance system hinge on our email address, why not require by law any ad network with an email address on record to send a monthly report detailing their use of your personal data?
The incentives here are two-fold. For ad networks who wish to build advertising profiles, increased transparency allows us to have a conversation around what gets collected, so that a Cambridge Analytica style breach can never happen again. We can’t do that when their entire business operates in the shadows. Second, if ad networks wanted to opt out of sending these reports they could simply stop collecting email addresses, which hinders their ability to follow us around even when we aren’t directly engaging with their services.
If you’re concerned about how ad networks like Facebook are collecting and using your information, you can find your representative using sites like whoismyrepresentative.com and call or email them to let them know. The EU has already been busy protecting their citizens from online surveillance and it’s time for the US to catch up. Or, if you’re uncomfortable contacting your representative, you could start giving retailers a bogus email address every time they ask. If you need some ideas for that, there’s a lot of email addresses listed at whoismyrepresentative.com you could use.