The Disconcerting Details: How Facebook Teams Up With Data Brokers to Show You Targeted Ads

Recently, we published a blog post that described how to opt out of seeing ads on Facebook targeted to you based on your offline activities. This post explained where these companies get their data, what information they share with Facebook, or what this means for your privacy.

So get ready for the nitty-gritty details: who has your information, how they get it, and what they do with it.  It’s a lot of information, so we’ve organized it into an FAQ for convenience.

What are data brokers and how did they get my information?

Is there a government surveillance aspect to this?

What information is flowing between data brokers and Facebook?

What does opting out mean?

Does Facebook have standards for companies that want to work with them?

Will Facebook show me targeted ads off of Facebook?

What should Facebook be doing differently?

What are data brokers and how did they get my information?

Data brokers are companies that trade in information on people – names, addresses, phone numbers, details of shopping habits, and personal data such as whether someone owns cats or is divorced.  This information comes from easily accessible public data (such as data from the phone book) as well as from less accessible sources (such as when the DMV sells information like your name, address and the type of car you own). As Natasha Singer of the New York Times described in her portrait of data broker Acxiom last year, “If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.”

Data brokers make money by selling access to this information. Some companies deal specifically with regulated businesses purposes, such as helping employers run background checks on job applicants. Other data brokers sell or rent the data for marketing purposes.

But details about where these companies get all of their data are still fuzzy.  Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass), Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) and six other lawmakers sent open letters to data brokers last year demanding answers about their business practices. The letters asked the companies to "provide a list of each entity (including private sources and government agencies and offices) that has provided data from or about consumers to you."

The companies gave vague responses. For example, in its 30-page response (PDF), Acxiom stated:

This question calls for Acxiom to provide information that would reveal business practices that are of a highly competitive nature. Acxiom cannot provide a list of each entity that has provided data from, or about, consumers to us.

The FTC has since opened an inquiry into data brokers.

Is there a government surveillance aspect to this?

There are government surveillance relationships to both data brokers and social networking sites that users should know.

Many data brokers work closely with the government. For example, the FBI has been paying Atlanta-based Choicepoint for access to its extensive database in order to screen for terrorist threats and for other purposes. And Acxiom worked with authorities after September 11th to track down 11 of the 19 hijackers -- and then continued to provide assistance to government agencies such as the TSA. 

We also know that the government looks to Facebook and other social media sites for a range of purposes, both for criminal investigations and much more.  EFF and the Samuelson Law Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law