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Title: Facebook Atlas: Giving Advertisers Invasive Maps of Your Life
Source:
eHow
URL Source: http://www.ehow.com/ehow-tech/blog/ ... rs-invasive-maps-of-your-life/
Published: Jan 12, 2015
Author: Katherine Albrecht & Liz McIntyre
Post Date: 2015-01-12 06:41:39 by Tooconservative
Keywords: Facebook, Privacy
Views: 8113
Comments: 21
Facebook has quietly introduced a new service for advertisers called “Facebook Atlas,” and we’re giving it a “thumbs down” because it’s not good for your privacy. Like an atlas, it offers a collection of maps, but these maps show the whereabouts and activities of Internet users — whether Facebook subscribers or not. These detailed maps are chock full of tidbits about the online and offline lives of consumers — and your life is most likely in this collection, whether you like it or not. You may think you can protect yourself online by deleting cookies and enabling the “do not track” feature in your browser, but Facebook Atlas has been designed to overcome these limitations. In fact, it’s people’s new-found privacy consciousness that’s driving marketers to develop surveillance methods like Atlas that are difficult to escape from. These days, most of us use multiple electronic devices to access the Internet, which makes it harder for marketers to track and profile people and their purchases. It’s also difficult for marketers to gauge the success of targeted ads if they can’t follow up on your purchase behavior to see if the ad worked. For example, if you browse an online store with your iPhone and later make a purchase at a brick and mortar store, or place an order through your tablet or desktop computer, it’s hard to link the two events. These blind spots are frustrating to marketers who want to know everything about you. They also crave the ability to watch those consumers who have the nerve to delete cookies or turn on “do not track” on their devices to help protect their privacy. Enter services like Atlas, designed to collect and consolidate information about everyone, no matter what devices they use, what cookies they delete or where they choose to shop. Atlas learns what devices people use by tracking their sign ins to Facebook and to a network of partner sites. Then it follows online activities like ad clicks using a wide variety of trackers, including persistent cookies and web beacons that are more difficult to delete. Atlas can also update your marketing profile by recording searches you do at non-private search engines and may use information gleaned from “free” email services that carefully analyze every message that passes through their servers. Here’s a list of possible sources they might use, straight from the company’s privacy policy: Atlas does not honor “do not track” requests set in people’s browsers. If you read through the lines of its carefully crafted privacy policy, Atlas states that even if you opt out of targeted advertising through the Network Advertising Initiative or Digital Advertising Alliance Consumer Choice Page, they’ll still track your behavior and store it — they just won’t serve you personalized ads. Gee, thanks! Check out their policy for yourselves, foks. It doesn’t get much more invasive than this: Unfortunately, Facebook’s Atlas isn’t the only company doing this kind of no-holds-barred consumer activity mapping. It’s the latest marketing trend. But let’s face it. Facebook has a huge snooping advantage because so many people use its social media service and often do so on multiple devices. Being tracked is not only offensive, it’s dangerous to our privacy and our civil liberties. Once a private company has your information, the government can get its hands on it, too. Here are a few ways to help minimize your exposure to these ramped up information collection schemes: Til next time, Katherine & Liz Join the privacy revolution by switching to StartPage.com the private search engine, and using StartMail.com encrypted email, both projects Katherine has helped develop. You can catch Katherine on radio daily at www.kmashow.com. And please read our book, Spychips, to learn more about privacy-invading technology and how to defeat it.
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Facebook refers to Atlas as “People-based marketing,” which might lead you to think we, the people, are in charge of its mapping process. But we’re not. Marketers are in charge of this newfangled initiative and most of us are completely unaware. 
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#1. To: TooConservative (#0)
I wish zuckerburg would choke on Obama next time they meet.
#2. To: A K A Stone (#1)
Zuck's power is derived from people being so ignorant about his data collection and selling their info to anybody for any purpose. Facebook definitely wants to get in bed with Big Gov. Already have actually. A lot of good advice here. Ghostery, NoScript, AdBlock Plus, and using DuckDuckGo or StartPage/Ixquick are a very good way to start shielding yourself from the tycoons'
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Replies to Comment # 1. I wish zuckerburg would choke on Obama next time they meet.
snoop search engines.
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