The websites you visit every day, like Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter, are tracking nearly every move you make online. Social media spying has started to come out in the limelight as more people are becoming curious as to what data they’re taking from you, and how invasive they are.
Having an informed opinion about the social media spying that is going on can help you fight back against them by voicing an informed opinion, and by changing your privacy settings. Read this article to see what the Big Four are up to.
Social media spying on Facebook
Let’s start off with the worst offender and work our way down. Not only is Facebook the most popular social network in the world, with over a billion monthly active users, but it is also the absolute worst for collecting data about users. If you haven’t already heard the saying a hundred times:
YOU are the product being sold on Facebook
Facebook records and stores data on nearly everything you do on the mobile app and desktop version:
- How long you chat with that hot new person in your life.
- Your online purchases by matching the email you provide to the website with the email you use on Facebook.
- The posts that you write and delete before posting, even individual words that you edit out.
- It records what websites you sign into using your Facebook account like OkCupid, Fitbit, any game on your phone.
- Friend’s email addresses that are stored on your phone.
Yep, they record stuff that is on your phone but not in any way connected to Facebook. Fun, eh? #bitterangrysarcasm
The last bit of crazy is how they track everything that you do on other websites by using cookies. They track what websites you go to, how long you spend there, what video you watch, what you download, and on and on.
If you’re interested in stopping this behaviour you have three allies, depending on where you are:
- The Digital Advertising Alliance in the US
- The Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada
- The European Digital Advertising Alliance
For your Android mobile device you can go to Google Settings > Ads > check off “Opt Out of Interest-Based Ads” so that it turns green. To do the same thing on iOS; go to General > Restrictions > Advertising, and then switch on “Limit Ad Tracking.”
Once this is all done, use a good cookie blocker like Ghostery or Ad Blocker Plus. Facebook still track some of your data, but it will not be nearly as profitable for them. For the added touch, a VPN service can scramble your location based data and make it difficult to track your specific activity thanks to the public IP addresses used.
Social media spying on Instagram
Since Facebook owns Instagram, you can bet that it is doing the exact same things as Facebook is. Facebook even had Instagram radically change their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy in 2012 when they took them over.
I’m not exaggerating when I say ‘radically changed.’ Instagram now laid claim to any photo shared on it as fair use for sponsored story posts, or to go to advertising firms. How much would users be paid for this? You guess it. Nothing. They claim to have backed off on this, but their current policy still has the same rights:
“(Instagram has )a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service.”
This gives them every right to take any photo you post on there and sell it to someone else. They give you a sum total of $0.00 for this.
The policy goes on to say that:
“We may share User Content and your information (including but not limited to, information from cookies, log files, device identifiers, location data, and usage data) with businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that Instagram is part of, or that become part of that group (“Affiliates”).”
Yes, they have covered themselves well for a future move to take photos. Once the look at social media spying dies down, if you let it that is, they’ll start doing just this.
Social media spying on Tumblr
Tumblr is owned by Yahoo!, so they have a different set of spying protocols that they use. Tumblr will track your:
- Location
- What you look at
- What websites you just visited
- What websites you go to after
With this information they build a profile about you that they sell to advertisers. After paying 1.1 billion dollars for Tumblr, you’d better believe that Yahoo! are going to milk it for all it’s worth.
For those who signed up for Tumblr before all this, you can delete your account and it will eventually be permanently deleted from the Yahoo! servers. Unless you were reblogged. That content will be around…forever. Which, scientists say, is a long time.
Social media spying on Twitter
Twitter is all about tracking data in order to be better present their Sponsored Tweets. Basic information that they track is:
- Your IP address
- Your location
- Who you follow
- Your activity on Twitter
This all pretty standard stuff, and isn’t nearly as invasive as some of the other social media spying that goes on. Most websites will track this same data. Our website doesn’t, but we do show you how easy it is to find some of this data out based on your IP address.
A big point in Twitter’s favor is how they are not part of the USA’s PRISM surveillance program. Not only is that a terrifying name, but it is the terrifying agency which seeks track all Internet activity. All of it. Remember when only criminals were followed everywhere they went? Congratulations, innocent Internet user, you’re being track too in an ‘assume guilt first’ approach to online monitoring.
That idea, that you’re tracked by the government before you’ve done anything wrong, is the truly frightening aspect of social media spying. A few websites making a buck off dealing with advertisers is an old concept being applied to new technology. The way that this data can be exploited, by the government and hackers, is what truly makes social media spying a topic you should be knowledgable about, and fighting against.
Feature image Brian A Jackson / Shutterstock