Shadow profiles: Facebook's data mine of information that none of us handed over to it

Facebook REUTERS/Regis Duvignau

If you are a Facebook user, most probably the social media giant knows a whole lot about you, perhaps more than what you have shared with it. This happens as it crawls through your web activities even outside Facebook by storing cookies in your browser.

Though, what if you have never had any Facebook account? Chances are it has information about you in that case too. Facebook creates profiles of its non-users, termed ‘shadow profile’.

What are shadow profiles?

Shadow profiles are Facebook’s automatically created profiles on non-users. Datasets for such profiles are collated by scraping through the information stored in phones and linked accounts of its users.

For example, if you allowed Facebook to read and download your contact list, maybe while using its Find Friends feature, it created a profile for everyone in your contact list. Every time, Facebook stumbles upon new information about each person from that contact list, it adds to the profile, thus creating a database for that particular person.

The first instance world got to know about it was in 2013 when contact information of about 6 million people was leaked due to a bug. Interestingly, many of them had never shared the information with the company.

Why is it in news now?

In the aftermath of the Facebook - Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quizzed by the US senators comprising the House Energy and Commerce Committee. One of the senators, Ben Lujan grilled Zuckerberg over shadow profiles.

When Lujan asked if Facebook collects data points on non-users, Zuckerberg did not deny it, however, he said he was not familiar with the term shadow profile. When quizzed, how many data points does Facebook collects, Zuckerberg expressed his ignorance.

Lujan later said to Zuckerberg, “it may surprise you that on Facebook’s page when you go to “I don’t have a Facebook account and would like to request all my personal data stored by Facebook” it takes you to a form that says “go to your Facebook page and then on your account settings you can download your data.”

He accused that Facebook was directing people, even those who do not have a Facebook account, to sign up so that they can see what the social media giant has stored about them without their knowledge or consent. That way it will be collecting more data about a person, he added.

Why does Facebook collect this data?

According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook collects information about non-users “for security purposes” to prevent reverse search scraping by attackers. [Attackers use public information like mobile phone numbers or email address to find it through Facebook search and obtain information about users.]

The major problem is that the company collects the information about non-users without their consent which could land it in a legal soup.

“You’ve said everyone controls their data, but you’re collecting data on people who are not even Facebook users who have never signed a consent, a privacy agreement,” Lujan said during the hearing. “We’ve got to change that.”