Study: Facebook Collects More Of Your Data Than Any Other Company

It’s no secret that Facebook relies on gathering our personal data to earn advertising revenue. However, the sheer amount of our information that the social media giant collects is eye-opening. That’s what a new study from the London-based cybersecurity firm Clario sought to illustrate with an expansive list of “companies that know most about you.”

Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram are the two most prolific collectors of user data. Astonishingly, out of all the data a business can legally collect about you, Facebook collects 70.59%. Meanwhile, Instagram collects 58.82%.

“As a social network, [Facebook depends] on you giving them access to all your details so they can recommend friends to you, let people know it’s your birthday, suggest groups for you to join and, most importantly, advertise to you,” Clario’s Mary Atamaniuk wrote. “Ads are how Facebook makes the most of their money — around $16.6 billion to be precise, based on their 2018 reports — so the more they know about you, the more they can sell on.”

If you’ve used Facebook at all, none of this is shocking. However, seeing the company’s thirst for our data laid out so clearly is still disturbing.




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