Thousands of Companies Send Your Data to Facebook Without Your Knowledge
But you can do something about it
On June 9th, 2020 at 2:13 pm, I paid $13.87 to have bubble tea delivered to my house via the popular food delivery service Doordash. I can’t say I’m especially proud of this decision.
When I made the purchase, I expected that my little indulgence would remain between me and Doordash, since I hadn’t done anything to explicitly link the service to my other online accounts. Maybe the driver who delivered it would roll their eyes. Maybe Doordash’s recommendation system would say “Ah, that’s a juicy sale!” and suggest I repeat the order in a few days. But I assumed my purchase wouldn’t ripple much beyond that.
But I was wrong. Doordash (and hundreds of companies like it) aren’t just recording every purchase you make. They’re also sharing purchase data with other companies, who are using it to target ads. And as I would discover as a result of my extravagant bubble tea order, one of those companies is Facebook.
When the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), a landmark privacy law, went into effect on January 1, it gave residents of California an unprecedented legal tool to access the information that big companies gather about them. This includes companies that would really prefer that their activities remain in the dark, like Clearview AI.
But the CCPA has also created a new and interesting corporate privacy strategy — drown the consumer in information. The logic here makes sense. The CCPA is scary — fines under the law, which began to be enforced on July 1, could easily run into the millions or even billions of dollars for large companies. Faced with this risk, some companies seem to have thought, “If we give the consumer access to basically everything, we can’t possibly be accused of CCPA noncompliance, right?”
The result is that consumers can now access massive data dumps from several large companies, including Facebook. To get your own, you simply go to…
