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The remaining few people who regularly use the internet but don’t have social media accounts can’t laugh at those who do now. It was recently revealed that Facebook was also collecting data on people who didn’t even have an account on the site. This means that anyone who saw the dangers of putting one’s data out there for everyone to see could also have had their data collected.
This new revelation occurred during the recent grilling of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg, which was specifically about how the social network giant was misusing the personal information of users it had gathered. When asked about something called “shadow profiles,” the MIT dropout claimed ignorance of the matter, which ScienceAlert noted was alarming.
As for what such profiles actually are, they are actually for people who have friends or social contacts who do have Facebook accounts and chose to share their contact data with the social network. Once they did that, the company already had some data about that person’s social circle and when one of the people in that user’s contact information chose to create a Facebook account, friend suggestions are ready to be presented.
This is something that has been in known in the social media industry for a while, ever since security researchers have started uncovering the practice. For Zuckerberg to claim that he has never heard the term is questionable but possible. He could not, however, claim that he didn’t know about the practice.
As Reuters notes, Facebook is also using Cookies to track the activities of users on the internet, even those who don’t have accounts on the social media. The company told the publication that this kind of practice is simply how the internet works.
"This kind of data collection is fundamental to how the internet works," Facebook’s statement reads. "There are basic things you can do to limit the use of this information for advertising, like using browser or device settings to delete cookies. This would apply to other services beyond Facebook because, as mentioned, it is standard to how the internet works."
