Want to track your sleep patterns? There are apps like Sleep Cycle for that. There are also fitness trackers that can do that, but did you know that you could also use Facebook Messenger? A software developer over in Denmark by the name of Søren Louv-Jansen actually did that by checking the activity timestamps of his friends.
For those unfamiliar, Facebook has activity timestamps for its Messenger app as well as the social network. For example you might log on in the morning to read the news and might have liked or shared an article, or sent a message, all of which will be logged. Louv-Jansen then put together a piece of software and by gathering all the timestamps from Facebook and Messenger, he managed to piece together the sleeping patterns of his friends.
Now the point of this isn’t so much to create a sleep tracker, but rather to point out how much digital footprints we leave behind without knowing. According to Louv-Jansen, he suggests that with this data, Facebook could potentially use it for profiling or ad targeting. “Facebook might block this little “hack”, so your friends no longer can track you, but Facebook will always be able to do their own data analysis which is undoubtably way better than what I’ve come up with. They are likely using this data for profiling, and creating more user-specific ads.”
There’s no way of confirming if this is what Facebook is doing, but it’s definitely something worth thinking about.