Here’s how Facebook explained that in its blog post: The company also claims it’s used for security purposes, like identifying bots. What does Facebook do with this data?Īs mentioned in Facebook’s recent blog post, some of the browsing data is used for analytics - that means that web and app developers pay Facebook to tell them how many people visit their site, etc. Depending on how detailed people are with their contacts, this data could include a lot more than just a phone number. It’s likely, though, that some contacts in their phone aren’t on Facebook - but they’re still giving this info over to the company. When people sign up for Facebook, many of them choose to upload their contacts to the service so that they can find other people to connect with. The other main way Facebook gets info from non-users is from its contact upload feature. That means Facebook might not make money from your browsing history if you aren’t a user, but it might spend money trying to reach you with its own ads. But Facebook can still use that information, which includes your IP address, to show you ads encouraging you to join Facebook. That’s because Facebook doesn’t sell targeted ads based on that browsing history like it does if you’re a registered user. If you’re not a Facebook user, though, the data is less valuable.

Facebook collects that data on everyone who visits these sites, whether they’re a registered user or not. When people navigate around the internet, sites that use Facebook’s advertising pixel or other social APIs linking back to Facebook (like the “Like” button) send data about those site visits back to the social giant. The browsing history data collection is what Facebook’s recent blog post described. What data is being collected about non-users?įacebook appears to collect data from non-users in two main ways: From their browsing history and from their friends.

And a Facebook spokesperson tells Recode, bluntly, “We don’t build shadow profiles of people.” The data is collected for other purposes, we’re told. This is how the internet describes Facebook’s data trove of information on people who aren’t actually users - the idea for the name being that Facebook has enough data from people to create a version of their profile even if they aren’t around to use it.įacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims he doesn’t know the term. What does the term “shadow profile” mean? Here’s what you need to know, courtesy of the blog and a company spokesperson. It also didn’t mention how long this data is stored, or how Facebook collects data from non-users when their friends who do use Facebook upload their phone contacts. It didn’t mention the term “shadow profiles,” for example, a phrase often used to describe the kind of faux profile that companies can have about people even if they haven’t signed up. It was a big enough admission that Facebook even wrote and published a blog post on Monday aiming to explain why it does this.īut the blog post didn’t include everything. One of the more interesting takeaways to come out of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s multi-day congressional testimony last week was confirmation that the social giant collects data from people online even if they don’t have a Facebook account.Īlso interesting: There’s no way to avoid it.

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