Dominate Social Media Internet platform including a highly visible web site and massive data mining engine to retail personal information. Users volunteer personal data including purchasing habits, personality traits, demographic information and other details which are collected and resold largly for commercial use specifically in the areas of marketing. Sometimes personal data is submitted to authorities for purposes such as criminal investigation. Facebook obtains its users personal data without compensating them and profits from the use and sell of what is collected.
Security and Privacy
Facebook profiles have become the de-facto identities of people across the internet. This is thanks, in large part, to Login With Facebook, the social network's universal login API, which allows users to carry their profile information to other apps and websites. Be advised Facebook's universal login feature carries security risks, according to research from Princeton University and other high profile credible sources.
Third-party tracking scripts have the capability to scoop up information from Facebook's login API without users knowing. The tracking scripts are part of an invisible tracking ecosystem that follows users around the web largely without their knowledge. When Facebook users don't take the time to disable an obscure option to grant permission for a website to access their Facebook profile, third-party trackers embedded on the site are getting that data, too. That can include a user's name, email address, age, birthday, and other information, depending on what info the original site requested to access. This type of tracking script is present on 434 of the web's top one million websites not exclusively including those that are querying Facebook data from the API, but also obtaining data from Facebook via security workarounds.
Most of the tracking scripts associated with Facebook grab a user ID that is unique to that website, as well as the person's name and email. However one security risk in using the Facebook is that the users find their unique ID is used by other web sites to connect to their social media profile often without their knowledge permission. The information is used to track Facebook users across other websites and devices.
Princeton University researchers identified seven different scripts that are capable of pulling information from Facebook's login API. Companies such as OnAudience have been collecting information from Facebook's login API to "profile" Facebook users for their behavioralengine.com marketing scheme. There are many such businesses that profile Facebook users in a manner similar to how the FBI will profile criminal suspects, except these companies are creating a profile of each user to know how he or she behaves, shops, spends personal time, and what personal habits the individual has which might be exploitable by companies.
