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I have previously written about how we are manipulated through ads and how big tech classifies us into types of personalities. However, all of these are under the assumption that you use the social media platform in question, e.g. Facebook or Instagram, etc. But what if you don't use them? Are you still being tracked? Can you still be tracked?
In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg claimed he didn't know what 'shadow profiles' are, however they've been long rumoured to exist. Shadow profiles are profiles created on users that don't use any of Facebook's services (and I'm sure other social media sites also have their own shadow profiles of people - I'll be using Facebook as an example here). If they really weren’t anything, why would Mark Zuckerberg pretend to not know about them?
What is a shadow profile?
The purpose of shadow profiles is so that ads can be shown to you even if the social media platform has no idea who you are. It's a profile with no social media user account attributed to it.
How are shadow profiles built?
There are many ways shadow profiles and social networks of people who don’t use the account are built. One of the ways is mobile phone numbers.
One of the things that social media websites encourage you to do is share your contacts with them. They’ll tell you it’s so that they can see if anyone else in your contacts also has a social media account on the platform you’re using. So when you share your contacts with a platform, say Facebook, you will be notified with everyone else in your contacts who also has shared their contacts with Facebook. But what you are doing in the meantime is giving Facebook a look into everyone else’s phone numbers and the names associated with those numbers.
The thing with phone numbers is that most people do not change them and hold on to the same numbers for literal years. It’s one of the very few identifying factors that don’t change about a person. So when multiple of your friends share their contacts with Facebook, Facebook can create a network.
For example, let’s say you, Mark Zuckerberg, do not have Facebook, but your friends Kevin and Jack do. In Kevin’s contact you are called Mark Zuckerberg with a phone number and job title attached. In Jack’s you are called Zucc, with the same phone number attached. Facebook now has a profile and a mobile number for a person called Mark Zuckerberg, and they are friends with Kevin and Jack.
Now Facebook can extrapolate this by looking through Kevin’s and Jack’s friends lists and see what other friends may have your phone number. Other friends may have your address, or email address, in their contacts. This extrapolation will teach them that Mark is the real name, no Zucc, but that might be a nickname. Some may even have a photo. By doing this, Facebook eventually can build a profile of this Mark Zuckerberg, without Mark ever making an account.
So now we know how the profiles can be created, but how do they track you through the internet?
An brief overview of Cookies
Cookies are probably one of the few tech terms that most people have heard of on a regular basis and have no idea what it does.
Cookies are tiny bits of code that a website can place on your computer or device to recognise who you are. This isn’t done with malicious intent - cookies can be used for various things, such as remembering what language you like your website to be or if you have something in the shopping cart. If you go on Amazon and add something to your cart, and then you clear your browser cookies, you’ll see that your basket becomes empty again.
The thing about cookies is that you need to visit a website first before they can plant a cookie on your device to say ‘this is Mark Zuckerberg’s Macbook’. However, Facebook has worked out how to add a Facebook cookie on to people’s devices without needing to go on to Facebook. This is done through the social media plugins. You know those Facebook like buttons on random websites? When you go on a website and it pulls the Facebook like button, your computer connects to Facebooks servers. When it does this, it sends things like your IP address (a string of numbers that can be used to uniquely identify you), the type of computer you are using, etc. Using this information, Facebook can work out if you have a Facebook cookie on your computer already. If you don’t, they’ll add one - and through other tracking technologies - link it back to your shadow profile.
Facebook, and other social media platforms, have convinced many websites to embed their buttons on to their websites through incentives such as paying them to display ads. Every time you see that social media button, you know your visit to that website and activity has been seen, tracked and analysed.
Sneaky redirections
Another way social media platforms can build shadow profiles and networks are through link sharing. One of the more interesting websites to run links through is https://wheregoes.com/.
If you paste a link in there, it will tell you if it is being redirected. This is a common thing to do when you are redirecting from an old website to a new website. Say you have a news.com website, and then changed it to breakingnews.com. You’d want to redirect everyone who goes to news.com to breakingnews.com.
However, this redirect can also redirect you to a website to quickly log your details to track you. Tiktok is a good example of this. Look at the screenshot below from wheregoes.com. At the top, there is a link that I received from a friend to a Tiktok video. If you click the link, you as the end user, will be sent to the Tiktok video. But the link itself actually redirects you to another webpage before it as you can see in the image below:
You can see that the link becomes a much longer link, with more tracking information of how the link was shared (WhatsApp), when it was shared, and specific user ids. Every time anyone clicks that link, Tiktok can track who clicked the link, who shared it, how it was shared, and other information, and eventually build a shadow profile and a network of friends not on Tiktok.
You really can’t escape
All this shadow profiling can be paired with data brokers (I wrote about how they are terrible previously) to build an even deeper profile about you. So you can think you are avoiding being tracked by not having any social media accounts, but it can do little to keep you being tracked. The profiles they have on you won’t be as in-depth as if you actually use their platform, but they still have way more on you than you may realise.
You can use specific browsers, like Brave Browser, that block these trackers as you browse the web, along with VPNs to change your IP address the website sees. These might slow down these social media giants, but it definitely doesn’t stop them.
So then this begs the questions, what’s the point? Should you avoid their services? If you avoid using Facebook to not be tracked, are you really achieving this? Or should you just give in and use their services? Maybe this should be regulated somehow? Should terms and conditions be more obvious about this?
I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I hope they are answered soon.
If you have a better idea than I do, if I’ve missed out anything or you think I am talking absolute rubbish, feel free to reach out either by commenting on the post, or by emailing me on tanvirtalks@substack.com
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