Facebook Reminds Users That Other Companies Harvest Their Data Too

At the moment Facebook is under immense scrutiny following the data privacy scandal. The focus does seem to be pretty much all on Facebook at the moment, but the company would like to point out and remind users that they aren’t alone in gathering user data, and that quite a few tech companies do it too.

In a post on its blog, Facebook’s Product Management Director David Baser explained about the data that Facebook gathers on its users, when they gather it, and what they use it for. He then adds, “Many companies offer these types of services and, like Facebook, they also get information from the apps and sites that use them. Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn all have similar Like and Share buttons to help people share things on their services. Google has a popular analytics service. And Amazon, Google and Twitter all offer login features.”

We suppose it is a fair comparison that Facebook makes, in which it isn’t just them who are gathering user information, but plenty of other online services as well. Baser also points out that quite a few of these companies also offer targeted advertising services (such as Google). “These companies — and many others — also offer advertising services. In fact, most websites and apps send the same information to multiple companies each time you visit them.”

That being said, it’s not surprising then that there are some companies who are working to thwart this kind of user tracking and data gathering, such as Apple who has built in features into Safari that prevents users from being tracked across the internet, much to the frustration of advertisers.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook, Google, Privacy, Twitter