How Facebook tracks your every movement
When I was looking at the alternatives that can be used other than Facebook I also looked to see what Facebook had to offer themselves. I found a Small Business help page that had a step-by-step to set you up as a small business on Facebook. I followed the steps and stopped when I got to the part where they wanted me to make a post.
The process automatically took my was greeted with the usual "Do you know these people?". In the past these were fairly random and if they were related they were people that I had communicated with using my alias or people that these people had made "friends" of. This time the "Do you know?" were people that I dd know and people who I definitely had NOT communicated with on Facebook using my alias. My assumption had to be that Facebook had used my geo location and.or my IP address to make this determination.
The people in question definitely DO KNOW ME, but not by my alias. They are probably confused why they are being asked if they know my alias!
Some quotes from the F-Secure blog:
The data Facebook potentially has on us all can be classified in 7 key categories:
1. Data your hand over willingly: everything you post directly; everything you ‘like’; every location check-in you make; all your friends/followers; all messages you send privately to your friends/followers; all your searches.
2. Data they can gather about your behaviour on their properties without any real consent: all your clicks; how long you stay on each image/video/text; how your mouse moves around (correlates with eye movements); all you type but don’t submit.
3. Data they can gather without any real consent about your behaviour on other properties that include Facebook spyware (ads, pixels, share/like buttons): all the same information as 1 & 2 combined; also Facebook create shadow profiles for tracking ‘users’ who have never used a Facebook service.
4. Data they can gather without any real consent from your phone/tablet: fine detailed geo-location over time; what other apps you use; files (videos/photos/documents) on your devices; user names, contacts, messages, calls; the name and metadata of every WiFi hotspot and BlueTooth device you have ever connected to; the infamous camera/microphone surveillance that they deny.
5. Data they can gather without any real consent from your phone/tablet via other apps: same as 3 but without installing any Facebook app on your device; for example, Facebook bought a VPN app that can report back on all internet traffic from all apps on a device with the app installed.
6. Offline data they can buy and/or get via partnerships without any real consent: your credit history, your bank card payments history; your shopping loyalty program history; any available government records (house ownership, voter registration, etc).
7. Online data they can buy and/or get via partnerships without any real consent: results of online tests you have taken for fun, which are often run by data stalking companies to build psychometric profiles (for example think Cambridge Analytica).
Fake Acccounts:
Actually, I feel quite secure in the fact that Facebook have no idea of who I am. Well at least only my alias, which has not only a false name but all the information in the profile is bogus. Facebook, obviously, knows where my alias accesses the Internet, but it does not have the information to link that to my real name. The email address attached to my alias's Facebook account is also in a fake name.