Thread by @JuliaAngwin

ICYMI Facebook’s announcement that it is shutting down relationships with data brokers is a big deal.

newsroom.fb.com/news/h/shuttin… /1

Facebook started working with data brokers in 2012 when it signed its first deal with Datalogix in 2012. Privacy advocates complained to the Federal Trade Commission, but since the agency can only punish “unfair or deceptive” behavior, nothing happened. /2
s3.amazonaws.com/documents.jdsu…

Facebook’s goal was learn more about its members. It already knew who their friends were, what they “liked” and websites they visited online. But the data brokers provided information such as their income, their recent purchases and what kind of car they drove. /3

In 2016, my team began investigating how extensive Facebook’s dossiers really were about its members. We built a tool that let people see what Facebook says it knows about them, and share that information with us. /4

propublica.org/article/breaki…

We found that Facebook had placed people into all sorts of bizarre categories such as people with an interest in “Breastfeeding in Public” and “Pretending to Text in Awkward Situations.” /5

Full dataset here: propublica.org/datastore/data…

We also found that 600 of the 29,000 categories Facebook offered to advertisers were from data brokers. They were extremely specific and often financial, such as income between $100k and $125k or frequent shopper at dollar stores. /6
propublica.org/article/facebo…

This year as we have been tracking political advertising on Facebook, we have found that many political candidates use information from data brokers to target their Facebook ads. Here is what we’ve found so far: /7 projects.propublica.org/facebook-ads/?…

Paul Ryan challenger Cathy Myers, Sen. Marty Heinrich (D-NM) and Sen. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) are among the political candidates using data brokers to target their Facebook ads.

In both of our data sets, information from data brokers appeared to be a small portion of the Facebook’s targeting business. Yet, using such data is still the norm in the industry.

It will be interesting to see if other Internet companies follow Facebook's lead. /end

Also .. correcting previous tweet … Tulsi Gabbard is a Rep. from Hawaii, not a Senator. Apologies.