How To Find Out What Facebook Knows About You

Around the largest Facebook social network, disputes about the competency of collecting and using user information do not subside. Such data could be used to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016. The British company Cambridge Analytica is blamed for this.

But would you ever like to know what Facebook specifically knows about you, and how does the social network use this information?

The social network constantly learns something new about you.

If you are one of the two billion active Facebook users, then most likely the social networks will know your date of birth, phone number, occupation, favorite music, places you visit, transport used and your favorite leisure activities.

To help advertisers conduct targeted advertising campaigns, the social network groups all the data into categories according to age, gender, interests, devices used to connect to the network and many other parameters.

The social network explains the need to collect information by the desire to make the ads displayed to users more interesting and urgent.

How can you find out that Facebook knows about you, in which category it relates to you, and how it decides which advertisement to show you?

So, there is a page called "Your Advertising Preferences." It is divided into four parts:

Your interests

The "Your interests" section lists your advertising preferences according to your tastes in the field of entertainment, professional and sports interests, the places you have visited and what you did there, your family, education, hobbies and lifestyle.

The social network explains why each of these elements is present there - a significant part of them appears after you click on any advertising link, install any application or put “like”, and also comment on any page.

The advertisers you interacted with

This section lists which advertisers have your contact information, which ads interest you and which sites you visit.

Your data

This section contains information about your marital status, employer and current position (if you indicated this in your profile).

But, perhaps, the most curious thing is that it indicates which advertising category you were assigned to (a lot of them - for example, “born in June”, “technology adherents”, “expatriates”, “iPad Air owners”).

Ad Settings

In this section, you can specify whether you want Facebook to send you ads in accordance with your interests, both on the social network and on other sites and applications that Facebook does not own.

A little tip: if you delete all the preferences and information that the social network has about you, this will not lead to a decrease in the amount of advertising in your feed: you will continue to see it, but it will appear by chance. You cannot completely block Facebook ads. “Thanks to advertising, the social network continues to be free,” says Facebook.