https://www.cesifo.org/en/publikationen/2022/working-paper/facebook-shadow-profiles

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 3. Facebook Shadow Profiles

Working Paper

Facebook Shadow Profiles

Aguiar, Luis / Peukert, Christian / Schaefer, Maximilian / Ullrich,
Hannes

CESifo, Munich, 2022

CESifo Working Paper No. 9571
PDF Download
[cesifo1_wp]

Data is often at the core of digital products and services,
especially when related to online advertising. This has made data
protection and privacy a major policy concern. When surfing the web,
consumers leave digital traces that can be used to build user
profiles and infer preferences. We quantify the extent to which
Facebook can track web behavior outside of their own platform. The
network of engagement buttons, placed on third-party websites, lets
Facebook follow users as they browse the web. Tracking users outside
its core platform enables Facebook to build shadow profiles. For a
representative sample of US internet users, 52 percent of websites
visited, accounting for 40 percent of browsing time, employ
Facebook's tracking technology. Small differences between Facebook
users and non-users are largely explained by differing user activity.
The extent of shadow profiling Facebook may engage in is similar on
privacy-sensitive domains and across user demographics, documenting
the possibility for indiscriminate tracking.

CESifo Category
Industrial Organisation
Economics of Digitization
Keywords: platforms, data, tracking, privacy, Facebook
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