How Facebook Uses Your Data & What You Should Know

Lump Facebook and privacy together in the same sentence and you have cause for a mighty heated discussion. It’s no secret that Facebook takes certain liberties with its terms of use as well as the data its users put on the site. It isn’t a problem for them to run experiments on their users, just to see how the users would react to manipulation of their newsfeed. Face it, Facebook gets the data you give them and they will use it.

IMAGE: Social Daily

If you think about it, how could your Facebook newsfeed be customized to such detail if it was only be based on your profile? How is it that your most favorite pages always feature some posts there, while those you neglect almost never appear? Is it a coincidence that you see an ad for sneakers after browsing through 5-10 sneaker brand websites?

We take a look at how Facebook uses the data we hand over to them, even without knowing.

Info Based On Your Social Media Activity

Although it’s true that the basis of your dossier is provided by your Facebook profile, there are many more sources other than that. The last F8 developer conference revealed three major sources for your news feed input that come from your on-site activity:

1. Interaction with your friends – on-site best friends you chat with every day will score top places

2. The type of content you’re more likely to enjoy – if you like and share more videos than photos, more video content will appear in your news feed

3. Activities on a certain post – if there are a lot of likes and comments and tagged photos of your friends, it will be featured at the top

IMAGE: Marsden Associates

To achieve this, Facebook tracks not only your likes, shares and comments (i.e. engagement), but also the time you spend watching or reading a single post. This is why long posts and videos might find better places in your feed than those single-image fun-with-cats posts.

Also, Facebook will try to find out your missing profile info (e.g. residing city, interests, education, workplace) based on your activity and engagement even long after you’d signed up. If most of the events you attend are in Chicago and most of your friends you often interact with are from Chicago, Facebook is surely going to ask you to confirm that you are, too, based in Chicago.

It’s good to know as well that Instagram is also owned by Facebook – so every photo you share and/or view will provide information. Just for fun, should you have missed it, here is a social media experiment to show you how much anyone can find out based on your social media activity:

And still, Facebook info-gathering tools don’t end here.

Info Gathered While You’re Browsing

Before we start, the most important thing everyone ought to understand is that every step they take online is most likely tracked by at least three parties: their internet service provider, the host of the visited site and at least one third-party tracking system, powered most likely by Google or Facebook.

The Usual Suspects: Cookies

Facebook (and most other similar sites) is commonly believed to achieve this tracking and information-gathering via cookies, which is only partially true. As per Wikipedia, a cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website to record the user’s browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited by the user as far back as months or years ago).

According to Facebook, they use cookies for authentication, security, localization, analytics and advertising. However, even though it is common to blame everything on cookies, Facebook relies on a different (yet still cookie-based) mechanism: their own login- and tracking-solution.

Facebook Connect

The easiest way for Facebook to know everything about you is its most commonly used Facebook integration feature for websites: Facebook Connect. SimilarTech reports that Facebook Connect is used on 5.5 million websites right now. Stats on leadledger add that around 30% of Fortune 500 and 50% of Internet Retailer 500 sites have Facebook Connect installed; it is also featured on around 25% of the Top 100,000 websites on the Web.

Facebook Connect offers website users a way to login with a Facebook account instead of registering to the website itself via a Single sign-on algorithm. Connect usually also makes it possible to like, share and comment most of the content you find on the web, especially on blogs and content-heavy sites.

IMAGE: LIDTIME

This service is quasi-free; in return, Facebook only collects user data while you’re on that particular site – and they also provide most of this data to those who integrate the feature in their code.

So after you log into your Facebook account among the first things when surfing the web, you stay logged in even after you close your Facebook tab, since you did not log out manually or haven’t made any precautions against it. While browsing and googling and reading your favorite blog, your Facebook account collects and provides information at the same time.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook will use your search interests and preferences to guess your motives for browsing. This information will be stored with your account info and be used later for your news feed design and advertisement positioning.

This way, if you look up and check out drone websites or shops by the dozens, Facebook will assume that you are interested in buying and/or flying drones. Hence Facebook will be serving Facebook ads of those stores featuring the latest and newest offerings of robotic products – even if you aren’t a fan of any drone-related Facebook page.

If you have promoted posts or launched ad campaigns via Facebook then you might know about the target audience setting. One can chose the targets’ age, sex, location, education, hobbies, interests and also filter by pages the audience had liked or groups they had joined.

And there’s the thing called lookalike audiences – people who are likely to be interested in a business because they’re similar to the chosen audience based on site registration, off-Facebook purchases, coupon claims and brand awareness.

What To Do About It

Since now you lnow all this, why not use it to your advantage?

Try searching and googling for stuff you are really interested in; like, visit and spend time on Facebook pages about that hobby; share and comment interesting posts (remember, a share "worth" about 5-15 likes while a comment weighs around 3-5 likes) – and disable your AdBlock extension.

Good luck digging out the good stuff using Facebook’s power drill.

Editor’s note: This is written by Marton Fekete for Hongkiat.com. Marton is a Hungarian site developer recently hooked on WordPress. He is a redesign enthusiast and freelance content writer who likes playing RPGs in his free time.

Now Read:
9 Ways To Keep Hackers off Your Facebook Account

How Facebook Uses Your Data & What You Should Know

How Facebook Uses Your Data & What You Should Know

Lump Facebook and privacy together in the same sentence and you have cause for a mighty heated discussion. It’s no secret that Facebook takes certain liberties with its terms of use as well as the data its users put on the site. It isn’t a problem for them to run experiments on their users, just to see how the users would react to manipulation of their newsfeed. Face it, Facebook gets the data you give them and they will use it.

IMAGE: Social Daily

If you think about it, how could your Facebook newsfeed be customized to such detail if it was only be based on your profile? How is it that your most favorite pages always feature some posts there, while those you neglect almost never appear? Is it a coincidence that you see an ad for sneakers after browsing through 5-10 sneaker brand websites?

We take a look at how Facebook uses the data we hand over to them, even without knowing.

Info Based On Your Social Media Activity

Although it’s true that the basis of your dossier is provided by your Facebook profile, there are many more sources other than that. The last F8 developer conference revealed three major sources for your news feed input that come from your on-site activity:

1. Interaction with your friends – on-site best friends you chat with every day will score top places

2. The type of content you’re more likely to enjoy – if you like and share more videos than photos, more video content will appear in your news feed

3. Activities on a certain post – if there are a lot of likes and comments and tagged photos of your friends, it will be featured at the top

IMAGE: Marsden Associates

To achieve this, Facebook tracks not only your likes, shares and comments (i.e. engagement), but also the time you spend watching or reading a single post. This is why long posts and videos might find better places in your feed than those single-image fun-with-cats posts.

Also, Facebook will try to find out your missing profile info (e.g. residing city, interests, education, workplace) based on your activity and engagement even long after you’d signed up. If most of the events you attend are in Chicago and most of your friends you often interact with are from Chicago, Facebook is surely going to ask you to confirm that you are, too, based in Chicago.

It’s good to know as well that Instagram is also owned by Facebook – so every photo you share and/or view will provide information. Just for fun, should you have missed it, here is a social media experiment to show you how much anyone can find out based on your social media activity:

And still, Facebook info-gathering tools don’t end here.

Info Gathered While You’re Browsing

Before we start, the most important thing everyone ought to understand is that every step they take online is most likely tracked by at least three parties: their internet service provider, the host of the visited site and at least one third-party tracking system, powered most likely by Google or Facebook.

The Usual Suspects: Cookies

Facebook (and most other similar sites) is commonly believed to achieve this tracking and information-gathering via cookies, which is only partially true. As per Wikipedia, a cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website to record the user’s browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited by the user as far back as months or years ago).

According to Facebook, they use cookies for authentication, security, localization, analytics and advertising. However, even though it is common to blame everything on cookies, Facebook relies on a different (yet still cookie-based) mechanism: their own login- and tracking-solution.

Facebook Connect

The easiest way for Facebook to know everything about you is its most commonly used Facebook integration feature for websites: Facebook Connect. SimilarTech reports that Facebook Connect is used on 5.5 million websites right now. Stats on leadledger add that around 30% of Fortune 500 and 50% of Internet Retailer 500 sites have Facebook Connect installed; it is also featured on around 25% of the Top 100,000 websites on the Web.

Facebook Connect offers website users a way to login with a Facebook account instead of registering to the website itself via a Single sign-on algorithm. Connect usually also makes it possible to like, share and comment most of the content you find on the web, especially on blogs and content-heavy sites.

IMAGE: LIDTIME

This service is quasi-free; in return, Facebook only collects user data while you’re on that particular site – and they also provide most of this data to those who integrate the feature in their code.

So after you log into your Facebook account among the first things when surfing the web, you stay logged in even after you close your Facebook tab, since you did not log out manually or haven’t made any precautions against it. While browsing and googling and reading your favorite blog, your Facebook account collects and provides information at the same time.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook will use your search interests and preferences to guess your motives for browsing. This information will be stored with your account info and be used later for your news feed design and advertisement positioning.

This way, if you look up and check out drone websites or shops by the dozens, Facebook will assume that you are interested in buying and/or flying drones. Hence Facebook will be serving Facebook ads of those stores featuring the latest and newest offerings of robotic products – even if you aren’t a fan of any drone-related Facebook page.

If you have promoted posts or launched ad campaigns via Facebook then you might know about the target audience setting. One can chose the targets’ age, sex, location, education, hobbies, interests and also filter by pages the audience had liked or groups they had joined.

And there’s the thing called lookalike audiences – people who are likely to be interested in a business because they’re similar to the chosen audience based on site registration, off-Facebook purchases, coupon claims and brand awareness.

What To Do About It

Since now you lnow all this, why not use it to your advantage?

Try searching and googling for stuff you are really interested in; like, visit and spend time on Facebook pages about that hobby; share and comment interesting posts (remember, a share "worth" about 5-15 likes while a comment weighs around 3-5 likes) – and disable your AdBlock extension.

Good luck digging out the good stuff using Facebook’s power drill.

Editor’s note: This is written by Marton Fekete for Hongkiat.com. Marton is a Hungarian site developer recently hooked on WordPress. He is a redesign enthusiast and freelance content writer who likes playing RPGs in his free time.

Now Read:
9 Ways To Keep Hackers off Your Facebook Account

How Facebook Uses Your Data & What You Should Know

5 Facebook Features You Probably Don’t Know

Last year, Facebook released Nearby Friends which tells you where you friend’s location is, and recently, Facebook is letting you make payments through Facebook Messenger. But did you know that Facebook keeps an archive of everything you have ever put on the social network, even stuff you’ve deleted before? Would you like to get a copy of this back?

We’ll show you how you can do this, plus a few other things — like how to make a donation to charity organizations, and save interesting stuff you find on your news feed to read later — you didn’t know you could do via/on Facebook.

1. Donate to Nonprofit Organizations

Did you know that you can donate to nonprofit organizations via their Facebook page? So far it is a small list of 19 organizations that include the American Cancer Society, American Red Cross, World Wildlife Fund and Malaria No More among others. To make your contributions go to their page, click on More right below the cover photo and choose Donate Now.

Enter your donation amount and payment information. Choose to make this a one-time donation or a recurring one then click Donate. 100% of your donations go to the nonprofit organization of your choice.

2. Retrieve Deleted Content

Have you ever wanted to retrieve certain information that you have accidentally deleted off Facebook? Well, you can. Simply go to your Facebook Settings page and click the Download a copy of your Facebook data link.

Click Start My Archive (in green) and enter your Facebook password when asked. Click Submit.

You will see this prompt box, and will need to click Start My Archive again. Wait for Facebook working for a few minutes and send you an e-mail containing download link for your data. Before you can download it, you will be prompted for your password again. Here is the kind of data you would expect from this download.

3. Save Now, Read Later

Every time you open your Facebook you will get a lot of news in your timeline. While most of them may be of interest to you, you might not have time to read them all. Chances are, once you’ve passed them, you won’t be able to find them again (unless they are heavily shared by everyone). To help you with this, use the Save option. It is found in the list of options under the dropdown button.

You can save items like links, places, movies, TV, music etc to check out later when you have the time. All your saved items will listed as “Saved”, which you can access from the left sidebar of your news feed.

4. Sync Facebook Calendar with Google Calendar

If you use Google Calendar to schedule all your important events but also have plenty of goings-on on Facebook, here’s how you can synchronize your Facebook Calendar with your Google Calendar to keep all your events in the same place.

First of all, go to the Facebook Event, you will see several events that involve you there. Then look at the bottom right corner of the page, you will find links Upcoming Events and Birthdays.

Right-click either one and select “Copy Link Address” or “Copy Link Location”.

Now go to Google Calendar. On the left side of the page there is the “Other Calendars” option, click the dropdown arrow button and select “Add by URL”.

Paste the link you copied earlier from Facebook, and click "Add Calendar". When the process complete, you can see the Calendar that you have imported appear in your Google Calendar.

5. Convert your Facebook profile into A Page

Did you know that you could convert your personal Facebook profile into a fan page? This way you can keep all your friends and followers rather than start from scratch.

To do this, first go to Profile to Page Migration. Then, choose a category for your Page. On the next page, select a subcategory and fill in required information. Lastly, click Get Started and follow the instructions provided. That’s it.

Note that this convertion is permanent, so it is better that you download a copy of your Facebook data (see #2 above) before you start migrating anything.

Now Read:
Facebook Housekeeping: 5 Things You Can Do Right Now

Related posts:

1. Share Facebook Statuses Easily With Status Snapper [Quicktip]


2. Facebook’s New Page Insights: Everything You Need to Know


3. 8 Things Researchers Learned From Your Facebook Use


4. How To Deal With Facebook Game Invites (The Right Way)

5 Facebook Features You Probably Don’t Know

5 Facebook Features You Probably Don’t Know

Last year, Facebook released Nearby Friends which tells you where you friend’s location is, and recently, Facebook is letting you make payments through Facebook Messenger. But did you know that Facebook keeps an archive of everything you have ever put on the social network, even stuff you’ve deleted before? Would you like to get a copy of this back?

We’ll show you how you can do this, plus a few other things — like how to make a donation to charity organizations, and save interesting stuff you find on your news feed to read later — you didn’t know you could do via/on Facebook.

1. Donate to Nonprofit Organizations

Did you know that you can donate to nonprofit organizations via their Facebook page? So far it is a small list of 19 organizations that include the American Cancer Society, American Red Cross, World Wildlife Fund and Malaria No More among others. To make your contributions go to their page, click on More right below the cover photo and choose Donate Now.

Enter your donation amount and payment information. Choose to make this a one-time donation or a recurring one then click Donate. 100% of your donations go to the nonprofit organization of your choice.

2. Retrieve Deleted Content

Have you ever wanted to retrieve certain information that you have accidentally deleted off Facebook? Well, you can. Simply go to your Facebook Settings page and click the Download a copy of your Facebook data link.

Click Start My Archive (in green) and enter your Facebook password when asked. Click Submit.

You will see this prompt box, and will need to click Start My Archive again. Wait for Facebook working for a few minutes and send you an e-mail containing download link for your data. Before you can download it, you will be prompted for your password again. Here is the kind of data you would expect from this download.

3. Save Now, Read Later

Every time you open your Facebook you will get a lot of news in your timeline. While most of them may be of interest to you, you might not have time to read them all. Chances are, once you’ve passed them, you won’t be able to find them again (unless they are heavily shared by everyone). To help you with this, use the Save option. It is found in the list of options under the dropdown button.

You can save items like links, places, movies, TV, music etc to check out later when you have the time. All your saved items will listed as “Saved”, which you can access from the left sidebar of your news feed.

4. Sync Facebook Calendar with Google Calendar

If you use Google Calendar to schedule all your important events but also have plenty of goings-on on Facebook, here’s how you can synchronize your Facebook Calendar with your Google Calendar to keep all your events in the same place.

First of all, go to the Facebook Event, you will see several events that involve you there. Then look at the bottom right corner of the page, you will find links Upcoming Events and Birthdays.

Right-click either one and select “Copy Link Address” or “Copy Link Location”.

Now go to Google Calendar. On the left side of the page there is the “Other Calendars” option, click the dropdown arrow button and select “Add by URL”.

Paste the link you copied earlier from Facebook, and click "Add Calendar". When the process complete, you can see the Calendar that you have imported appear in your Google Calendar.

5. Convert your Facebook profile into A Page

Did you know that you could convert your personal Facebook profile into a fan page? This way you can keep all your friends and followers rather than start from scratch.

To do this, first go to Profile to Page Migration. Then, choose a category for your Page. On the next page, select a subcategory and fill in required information. Lastly, click Get Started and follow the instructions provided. That’s it.

Note that this convertion is permanent, so it is better that you download a copy of your Facebook data (see #2 above) before you start migrating anything.

Now Read:
Facebook Housekeeping: 5 Things You Can Do Right Now

Related posts:

1. Share Facebook Statuses Easily With Status Snapper [Quicktip]


2. Facebook’s New Page Insights: Everything You Need to Know


3. 8 Things Researchers Learned From Your Facebook Use


4. How To Deal With Facebook Game Invites (The Right Way)

5 Facebook Features You Probably Don’t Know

How To Deal With Facebook Game Invites (The Right Way)

We need to talk about Facebook games. I believe if you’re on Facebook, you are either on the team that plays games, or the team that does not. The former basically taps into Facebook for favors from friends while the latter runs the "Please do not invite me anymore" recording on loop.

The bad news is, this is going to keep going on for as long as you are still on Facebook. The good news is, you don’t have to sever ties with friends who "just don’t get it that I do not want to be a part of their Villes". The what-you-should-know news is that whether you play Facebook games or not, there are things that you can do to better manage this.

More related posts on Hongkiat:

• 20 Facebook tips and tricks you should know


• Essential Facebook etiquette: 10 do’s and don’ts


• 7 signs you are addicted to Facebook


• 5 things you shouldn’t put on your Facebook


• How to keep hackers out of your Facebook account

I’m going to split this into two sections where you either (1) don’t play Facebook games or (2) do. Please find your seats. Let’s take a look.

Recommended Reading: 7 Ways To Manage Your Facebook Wall Feeds Better

I Don’t Play Facebook Games

So you get a Facebook notification only to find out that it is an invitation by so-and-so to play games. This is starting to frustrate you because it’s the umpteenth time you have asked your friends nicely to stop doing this.

The thing is, for almost all Facebook games, there is the "Invite All" or "Send to All" option readily available. Certain games (but not all) may have collected your friends who are already on the game on a smaller list. In both cases, the urge to be lazy and just send requests to everyone on the list – instead of picking the names one by one – is strong.

Basically Facebook game players see your messages, but Facebook does not make it easy for them to choose who not to spam – and there is nothing you can make them do about it.

But you can stop getting notifications, and stop receiving their updates as well as requests.

To Stop Getting Notifications

1. When you receive a Facebook notification on your desktop, click on the notification icon for a dropdown of all your notifications and locate the game notification.

2. However near the right side of the bar and you will see a circle and a cross appear. The circle gives you the Mark as Read option. The cross allows you to turn off notifications. Click on the cross.

3. Click Turn Off. And you will no longer receive notifications from said game. Do this once for each game.

To Stop Seeing Game Updates

1. On your Facebook feed, look for any game-related posts, like these:

2. To the right of the name of the game, you will find an arrow-down button. Click on it to see a dropdown menu.

3. You will see several options:

(1) I don’t want to see this will help you block that single post.

(2) Unfollow [friend] will ensure you no longer see posts from said person, including non-game-related ones.

(3) Hide all from [game] will block updates from any friend related to that game.

4. Pick any of the option above. I usually go with Option #3. Note that you will have to do this for each and every game, one at a time.

To Block Game/App Invites

This is for those who have too many invites from too many games from too many friends. The fastest way to get rid of all this drama is to block those invites in one go. Here’s how:

1. On your Facebook main page, go to the far right at your top menu bar. Click on the dropdown arrow and click on Settings.

2. On the left sidebar, choose Blocking and you will be taken to the Manage blocking section.

3. To Block app invites from someone, go to that section (third from the top) and type in his or her name. The field autocompletes so you can click on the person’s name or press Enter. You will no longer receive app invites from that person. Don’t worry, your friends probably won’t notice if you do not respond to their invites.

4. While you’re there, you can head down two more sections to the Block apps section and type in the games you want to block unconditionally. The field autocompletes too so you can take a stab at what the game name contains like Candy or Ville or Pirate, and click the app to single it out.

So far so good? Now, share this post with a fellow friend who is frustrated with game gangsters who can’t stop making game requests he or she can’t refuse.

I Play Facebook Games

I come in peace, and a proposition. If you want to play Facebook games, do it on a separate Facebook account. All you need is a second email address, which I think most people already have.

You get two benefits from this: you get to avoid the wrath of your friends, and secondly you get to tap into a world of Facebook game players who share your level of enthusiasm when playing the same games.

They don’t even have to be people you know. People who play Facebook games usually play multiple games, are active in game forums, and add tons of friends for help and favors to advance in the game. You will feel right at home.

There are two drawbacks that I know of. First, you will probably need to start from scratch for most of your games because I do not know if you can unlink your Facebook account from the game and link another Facebook account to it while keeping your most current progress (if you find out, let us know).

Secondly, since Facebook has yet to allow multiple account sign-ins on their Facebook mobile apps, you may need to choose which Facebook account to have on your mobile – I’m just going to leave this dilemma here, and move on.

Wrap Up

Having two Facebook accounts helps you separate your game addiction from what you do outside of it. Sure, there are implications of game addictions but let’s not go into that in this post. Truth is, there are many things you yourself can do rather than just ask people to stop sending game requests and invites – and now that you know, send this to someone who you think may need this.

Related posts:

1. How You Are Helping Hackers Steal Your Data


2. 20 Facebook Tips And Tricks You Should Know – Part II


3. Hack – The Language Behind Facebook


4. 15 Facebook App Tips And Tricks For Android Phones

How To Deal With Facebook Game Invites (The Right Way)