Turning Off Facebook Location Tracking Doesn't Stop It From Tracking Your Location
Aleksandra Korolova has turned off Facebook’s access to her location in every way that she can. She has turned off location history in the Facebook app and told her iPhone that she “Never” wants the app to get her location. She doesn’t “check-in” to places and doesn’t list her current city on her profile.
Despite all this, she constantly sees location-based ads on Facebook. She sees ads targeted at “people who live near Santa Monica” (where she lives) and at “people who live or were recently near Los Angeles” (where she works as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California). When she traveled to Glacier National Park, she saw an ad for activities in Montana, and when she went on a work trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, she saw an ad for a ceramics school there.
Facebook was continuing to track Korolova’s location for ads despite her signaling in all the ways that she could that she didn’t want Facebook doing that.
This was especially perturbing for Korolova, as she recounts on Medium, because she has studied the privacy harms that come from Facebook advertising, including how it could be previously used to gather data about an individual’s likes, estimated income and interests (for which she and her co-author Irfan Faizullabhoy got a $2,000 bug bounty from Facebook), and how it can currently be used to target ads at a single house or building, if, say, an anti-choice group wanted to target women at a Planned Parenthood with an ad for baby clothes.
https://gizmodo.com/turning-off-facebook-location-tracking-doesnt-stop-it-f-1831149148
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