Social media site changes users’ privacy settings without their consent
Facebook recently began tracking and serving ads to web users who don’t even have an account on the social media site. In doing so, Facebook also quietly changed the ad settings of its users without their consent.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook will target both users and non-users across the web to show them advertisements by tracking them with everything from cookies to “like” buttons.
“Our buttons and plugins send over basic information about users’ browsing sessions. For non-Facebook members, previously we didn’t use it,” Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Facebook’s ads and business platform, told the Journal. “Now we’ll use it to better understand how to target those people.”
As noted by David Carroll, associate professor of media design at Parsons School of Design, Facebook users who had previously opted out of being shown ads based on their browsing were opted back in without being told.
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