In recent years, data has become one of the tech industry’s most valuable commodities. In 2011, the World Economic Forum classified data as a new asset class, with one European official calling personal data “the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world.”

The past decade has seen that early prediction play out at scale as the collection of personal data — and the targeted ads and tailored algorithms that have followed — has become an expectation of being on the internet. 

As Quivr founder Joe Miller told TheStreet last year, data collection has become the cost-of-admission for anyone looking to use any internet-based applications. 

Related: Facebook whistleblower praises Mark Zuckerberg’s recent troubles as a ‘historic day’

And while many are aware that their data gets scraped, the extent of what that looks like is still not widely known. 

Taking advantage of a new data privacy feature by Meta  (META) – Get Free Report, Consumer Reports and The Markup conducted a recent study highlighting the scale at which personal data makes its way across the web. 

The report found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about a panel of only 709 volunteers to Meta. 

On average, more than 2,000 companies shared data with Meta about each participant, with some volunteers’ data being shared by more than 7,000 companies. 

The study hinged around a commonality in the companies that collect personal data: They advertise on Facebook. By accessing Facebook’s Download Your Information Tool, users can access some of the information about them that companies have sent to Facebook while using its Ad Manager platform. 

The study focused on Custom Audiences and Events datasets, where the former refers to personal information — including addresses and emails — shared by Facebook advertisers to inform targeted ads, and the latter refers to details of a given user’s personal interactions with an advertiser’s company. 

More than 700 Facebook users downloaded their information and shared it with Consumer Reports between June and September 2023, where the organization then cleaned, processed and analyzed the total dataset. 

By aggregating this data, Consumer Reports was able to analyze “server-to-server” tracking, where someone’s personal data is transferred from one company’s servers to Meta’s servers. 

96% of the volunteers’ data was shared by LiveRamp, a data broker. 

“We offer a number of transparency tools to help people understand the information that businesses choose to share with us, and manage how it’s used,” a Meta spokesperson told The Markup in a statement.

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Study: Transparency remains a key problem 

Still, the study found that only 34% of the companies identified provided a link to a website; many of the listed company names were not clearly identifiable. 

“In these instances, it is virtually impossible for even motivated consumers to understand who is tracking and targeting them, and for consumers to exercise their rights under existing state privacy laws,” Consumer Reports said. 

Beyond data brokers, certain popular retailers — including Home Depot, Amazon, Walmart and Macy’s — were listed among the 100 most frequently occurring companies in the volunteers’ data. 

However, a large portion of the companies that appeared in the data were small retailers or non-national brands, according to the study, signifying the accessibility of micro-targeting through Meta’s software and through data brokers. 

In one such targeting scenario, information shared by websites and companies helps Facebook track each user, targeting ads to that user. In another, businesses that purchase sets of personal data from a data broker can then provide that data to Facebook so their ads target a specific profile. 

The prevalence of such data providers, Consumer Reports said, highly impacts the transparency of Facebook’s data download feature. 

The organization, calling the tool “inadequate,” suggested that “going forward, Facebook should ensure that data quality is standardized and intelligible to consumers.”

The report added that consumer data ought to be easily traceable to its source. 

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Related: Even regulation won’t stop data scraping from AI companies, Quivr founder warns

Meta’s controversial “link history”

The study comes just two weeks after Meta launched a new feature called “Link History” which saves all the links a given user has clicked on in the past 30 days.  

Meta said the new feature, which it touted as a tool to enable users to “never lose a link again,” is being introduced globally over time, and is not yet available in all locations. 

Though it is turned off by default, Facebook is pushing users to toggle it on through pop-ups. 

The feature, however, is another tracking tool from the social media giant. 

The company says in its help center that “when link history is on, we may use link history information from Facebook’s Mobile Browser to improve your ads across Meta technologies.”

Data protection expert Pat Walshe told Fast Company that “the development shows again how Facebook doesn’t put privacy first.”

Shares of Meta, up around 3% so far for the year, were down slightly Wednesday afternoon. 

Contact Ian with AI stories via email, ian.krietzberg@thearenagroup.net, or Signal 732-804-1223.

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