Even though Facebook users are not paying monthly fee to Facebook for using it, Facebook are making profit out of personal data of the users that they are tracking and collecting. The article stated that Facebook made about $7 per user in revenue last year. Considering that there are more than billion monthly active Facebook users, the amount of profit is tremendous. The main profit was by selling the personal data to the marketers. Marketers were allowed to access to the users’ data, advertising specific advertisement that each users are interested in.
If you surf the websites, you might have seen specific advertisements about things that you recently searched on. It is actually specifically targeting you. How do they do that? Basically, Facebook is tracking you. They are collecting data when you are trying to search the websites on your smartphone, tablets, which is outside of the social network, Facebook. To make the advertisement better, they require extra data about you, which is because Facebook is tracking their users. They track whom you are contacting to, friends you meet, and the locations you visited, pretty much everything you do online.
A lot of people still do not realize that their personal data is collected by Facebook and other companies, and traded between companies to make profits and advertise specific things based on the personal data they have collected and shared. There are ways where the users can reduce Facebook to track their data via smartphones. Facebook monitors the user’s location on their smartphones and even app that the users are using. A lot of users allow the location for Facebook to access, which actually allows Facebook to access to your data when people are using their smartphones. If a user turn off the location sharing for Facebook on their smartphones, it can stop Facebook to track and access to your data when using smartphones. It is not completely stopping Facebook to track data of the users, but it is one of the ways that can block them to track users.
There is nothing the users can do about it unless people stop using Facebook. Our personal data, privacy is the price the users are paying for using the Facebook, which they have to put up with.