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Facebook maintains “shadow profile” accounts for people who have not personally made an account [1], the answer to your question is “whatever information your f

• ben_w 4y ago
  They did. I suspect that if they still do, there's going too be a really painful GDPR penalty heading their way.
  • wyre 4y ago
    Cost of doing business? Is GDPR protecting me as an American from Facebook shadow profiling me? How significant are GDPR fines?
    • notimetorelax 4y ago
      In theory 4% from yearly revenue (not earnings, revenue), in practice I haven’t seen it being applied.
      • digitalengineer 4y ago
        Here you go. Click your country's flag to see your results https://www.enforcementtracker.com https://www.enforcementtracker.com (if you're European, that is).
  • namlem 4y ago
    They can still do it to non-Europeans
    • marginalia_nu 4y ago
      How can they tell how an email address is European?
      • mortenjorck 4y ago
        Because you told them while you were creating your Meta account, and because the credit card you entered matched what you told them.
        • marginalia_nu 4y ago
          Sure, but we are talking about shadow accounts, not Meta accounts.
• izzydata 4y ago
  so you think they are confident enough to link somebodies randomly created alias, let's say "InteretDude420" to a real name? What if opened a VR Arcade and owned 100 Oculus Quests and made 100 separate accounts?
  • neodymiumphish 4y ago
    A massive number of sites have Facebook tracking built in, since FB pays them a fraction of a penny for each visit it monitors. They don't care what username you're using; they just need to correlative fingerprinting (IP addresses, browser/device profile, any data from other apps installed on the same device, etc). If you opened that arcade, they'd probably recognize that through a couple hundred different datapoints and use that to further analyze user behavior (For example: Which FB/Instagram users went to your arcade, stayed for a significant amount of time, then left. Of those, which don't already own a Quest -- market to them).
  • ziddoap 4y ago
    >so you think they are confident enough to link somebodies randomly created alias, let's say "InteretDude420" to a real name? After a certain amount of fingerprinting, absolutely. It's not as if they are solely relying on user-submitted information such as a handle to make that link. And if no link can be made right this second, they can just continue to collect data under "InteretDude420" until they reach a certain amount of confidence to link it to a real identity. And, even if they get it wrong some % of the time, who would ever notice or find out? Eventually they just get more data and increase the confidence rating for the correlation. It is surprising how little information (even "anonymized information") is needed to de-anonymize someone. Plenty of papers on the subject if you are curious.
    • SoftTalker 4y ago
      Yes, zip code/geo-location plus a few other points of personal data are often enough to identify an individual. Then tie that to a browser fingerprint and you can tie together all their "anonymous" screen names.