Facebook Custom Audience

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How Facebook (ab)uses your mobile number!

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I am receiving quite a few notifications on the Facebook mobile app (although I don’t look that often), asking me to do something with my mobile number, well I didn't think I had it on there, in fact I don’t have it on my profile, but in researching further I discovered it’s there in the background, stupid me. More about that in a bit, but first a few things to share for context.

I am not a big fan of Facebook and I am very suspicious of Mark Zuckerberg. He is exactly the same as any dictator who has ever lived and lied his way into becoming a billionaire, just think about it.

Facebook had 2.912 billion monthly active users as of January 2022, placing it 1st in ranking of the world’s most ‘active’ social media platforms. Nearly 3 billion people on the globe have happily shared their email and very likely their mobile number with Facebook. This data that we have so willingly shared is a forever unlimiting goldmine for Facebook, it’s shareholders and it’s advertisers. Facebook’s monthly active users equate to 36.8% of all the people on Earth today. I call that a pretty big dictatorship!

They (Facebook) have been accused of so many data crimes, but have never been prosecuted and nobody has gone to jail, okay they’ve had a few minor fines, which basically was pocket change for them. You can read the whole timeline of their crimes here: A timeline of trouble: Facebook's privacy record and regulatory fines, by Guild ~ 4 August, 2021

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Sludge Theory is alive, well and thriving everywhere!

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The two defining characteristics of a sludge (Thaler, 2018) are “friction and bad intentions” (Goldhill, 2019). While Richard Thaler strongly advocates nudging for good by making desirable behaviour easier, a sludge does the opposite: It makes a process more difficult in order to arrive at an outcome that is not in the best interest of the sludged. Examples of sludges include product rebates that require difficult procedures, subscription cancellations that can only be done with a phone call and complicated or long government student aid application forms.

Even when a sludge is associated with a beneficial behaviour (as in student aid, voter registrations or driver’s licenses, for example), costs can be excessive. These costs may be a difficulty in acquiring information, unnecessary amounts of time spent, or psychological detriments, such as frustration (Sunstein, 2020).

Our data our human right!

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I recently watched The Great Hack on Netflix. At the time when the Cambridge Analytica story broke I was right on it and it changed my view of Facebook forever. I still have an account but the truth is I’d rather not. Trouble is because so many people are on Facebook, you can’t ignore it as a channel to promote your business or event. I hate that they have such a hold on us all. It’s actually worse then governments, we are such slaves to social media and especially Facebook, yuk!

I actually was a massive promoter of FB way back when they were just a spot on everyone’s mind. I even introduced friends and family to join it so we could engage with each other. Some friends even said, really Michael, you think it’s important for me to be on Facebook?

Even before the CA story broke, I had stopped using FB, maybe I just sensed that they were a timesuck for everyone and that the fake news brigade were pointing a fire hose at it.

One thing that did surprise me from The Great Hack documentary was a name I had not heard of before Brittany Kaiser, she was the deal maker for CA and did the deal with Donald Trump’s campaign team. Wow, how lucky was Trump that she walked into his campaign HQ. She showed a significant degree of remorse and even described the tools they had used as military grade weapons.

Mark Zuckerberg reminds me of one of the characters straight out of Star Wars, you know one of the evil officers on the enemy ship, especially with his haircut. We like to describe Trump like evil, but actually Zuckerberg is 100 times more evil compared to Trump. The billions have definitely gone to his head.

I believe it won’t be long before he’s out of Facebook now.

The documentary, which I know focuses almost exclusively on Facebook, is probably just the tip of the iceberg and of course they’re not the only company who are data miners. They all are, Amazon, Apple, Google (Alphabet), Microsoft and many others that aren’t even famous yet. In case you’re thinking WhatsApp or Instagram, you are correct, but they’re part of Facebook, who are already guilty.

The biggest crime I believe Facebook are allowing is companies uploading our emails or mobile numbers to their Facebook custom audiences product, which means they can target us directly. And Mark Zuckerberg says he doesn’t sell our data, which is a complete and outrageous lie. Every couple of weeks I go inside my personal settings and delete a bunch of companies who are using my email address to target adverts to me. They have to physically upload my data to FB and then FB lists those companies on my ads settings. Unbelievable! 🙈

All of us need to get educated and realise that our data is being mined by all of the biggest companies on the Internet and there are no signs on the horizon that this is going to change anytime soon.

Happy data protecting!

Michael de Groot