Facebook collects a significant amount of data about its users. This allows them to understand their users’ behaviors, interests, relationships, and more in order to provide a personalized experience and target advertising. In today’s digital age, data collection is common among social media platforms and websites. While users benefit from personalized experiences, data collection also raises privacy concerns.
User Information
When you sign up for a Facebook account, you provide basic personal information including:
- Name
- Email address or mobile phone number
- Date of birth
- Gender
This information is required to create your account. You can also add other information to your profile like:
- Profile photo
- Cover photo
- Hometown
- Current city
- Education and work history
- Relationship status
- Bio and interests
Providing this information helps Facebook build a profile about you to connect you with friends, content, and advertisements that may interest you. However, it’s optional to fill out much of your Facebook profile beyond the basics required during sign up.
Content You Post
Facebook collects and analyzes the content you post on its platform, including:
- Status updates
- Photos and videos
- Articles and links
- Check-ins
- Events
Facebook scans and indexes your posts to understand your behaviors and interests. For example, posting frequently about sports may result in more sports-related content in your News Feed. Sharing photos from a recent vacation could cause Facebook to show you more travel ads. Talking about politics might lead to political ads being targeted to you.
Interactions
In addition to what you post, Facebook gathers data based on how you interact with the platform, including:
- Pages, groups, and events you follow or interact with
- Ads you click on
- Status updates you like, comment on, or share
- Content you hide, report, or block
- Friends you add or remove
- Videos you watch on Facebook
Analyzing your interactions allows Facebook to refine its understanding of your interests and preferences. Liking sports-related pages suggests an interest in sports. Hiding certain ads implies you didn’t find them relevant. Watching cooking videos may result in more food content. Even who you choose to friend or unfriend provides clues about your relationships and beliefs.
Device Information
Facebook collects information from the devices you use to access Facebook, including:
- Hardware model
- Operating system
- Browser type
- IP address
- Mobile network provider
This device data helps Facebook understand how people use their services across different platforms. Someone accessing Facebook from an iOS device may receive different content than an Android user. Accessing the site from multiple locations can indicate where you live, work, and travel.
Contact Information
If you choose to upload your contact list to Facebook, they are able to collect information about the contacts in your list including:
- Names
- Phone numbers
- Email addresses
Access to your contact list allows Facebook to better understand your relationships and to improve friend recommendations. However, uploading contacts raises privacy concerns since it shares information about others without their consent.
Facebook Pixels
Many websites use Facebook pixels to collect data about user activity. A Facebook pixel is a code that tracks:
- Pages you visit
- Content you view
- Items you add to your cart
- Purchases you make
This data allows Facebook to track user activity across sites and devices to target advertising. Pixels provide analytics to websites while giving Facebook expansive data about off-platform activity.
Location Data
Facebook collects location data in a few different ways including:
- Location services if enabled on mobile devices
- IP addresses that indicate location
- Check-ins, events, and metadata from photos
Location data improves ad targeting, helps power features like friend suggestions and event recommendations, and builds maps of places you go. However, constant location tracking raises privacy issues.
Facial Recognition
Facebook’s facial recognition systems can identify people’s faces in photos and videos. This allows them to:
- Suggest tags when users post photos
- Detect unauthorized use of others’ photos
- Analyze user engagement with ads based on facial expressions
Facebook claims these practices improve user experience. However, facial recognition has raised ethical concerns and been banned in some jurisdictions.
Third-Party Partners
Facebook allows third-party partners to collect data through:
- Facebook Login features
- Facebook Pixel tracking
- Social media apps connected to Facebook
Data from third-party partners supplements what Facebook collects directly to inform advertising profiles and analytics. However, this practice depends on sharing user data with outside companies.
Surveys
Facebook occasionally prompts users to take voluntary surveys about ads or content. These surveys can collect information like:
- Age
- Gender
- Job and education
- Shopping habits
- Income
While surveys are optional, they provide Facebook with additional demographic and behavioral data from willing participants.
Cookies and Tracking Technologies
Like most websites, Facebook uses cookies and tracking technologies like pixel tags to collect data about visitors including:
- Time spent on site
- Pages visited
- Referring domains
- Return frequency
Facebook combines its tracking data with account information to understand usage patterns and serve relevant content and ads. Disabling cookies limits some website functionality.
Messaging Services
Facebook’s messaging services like Messenger and WhatsApp collect data about how you communicate including:
- Message content
- Attachment types
- Frequency contacting different individuals
This provides indicators about your connections and conversational habits, which may personalize your experience and advertising.
Partner Agreements
Facebook can collect data through partnerships with:
- Websites and apps who use Facebook services
- Device manufacturers
- Mobile carriers
- Broadband providers
- Operating system and browser providers
- Chip designers
These partnerships give Facebook information about user activity across services and devices to enhance profiling and analytics.
Online and Offline Data
Facebook combines online data collected through their services with offline data including:
- Purchase history
- Loyalty programs
- Demographic info from data brokers
- Census records
- Surveys
Offline data helps fill in gaps about users to make profiles more robust for ad targeting and analytics.
App Activity
If allowed, Facebook collects data from Oculus VR headsets and Portal smart devices including:
- Apps used
- Content viewed
- Product interactions
- Device usage
- Purchase activity
This provides Facebook with expanded data on real-world and virtual behavior across their hardware platforms.
Future Technologies
As new technologies emerge, Facebook is likely to collect new types of data including:
- Augmented reality interactions
- Voice assistant recordings
- Biometrics
Facebook is researching innovations in areas like brain scanning which could provide unprecedented insight into user perceptions and thought processes.
Conclusion
In summary, Facebook collects an enormous amount of data about its users including:
- Personal profile information
- Content users post
- Interactions on the platform
- Device data
- Contact information
- Activity on external websites
- Location information
- Facial recognition data
- Data from third-party partners
- Survey responses
- Cookie tracking data
- Messaging metadata
- Partnership activity
- Online and offline data
- App usage
- Emerging technologies
This allows Facebook to build robust profiles about their users for targeted advertising, content suggestions, analytics, and more. However, the scale of Facebook’s data collection raises growing concerns about privacy risks. Users must weigh the value of personalized services against potential loss of control over their information.