Written by Ruth Reader on Fast Company.
[L]ots of health companies use Facebook to advertise. As my “off Facebook activity” download showed, much of what gets shared with Facebook is indirect information, such as dates and times I visited a website or app, products, or prescriptions I have looked at or purchased, and products I put in a digital shopping cart.
But glued together, these scraps of information create a collage of my overall health, which Facebook can then sell advertisements against. In collecting data about my health behavior and interests, Facebook probably knows more about my health than my doctor.
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At the end of last year, Planned Parenthood decided to stop using Facebook’s mobile software development kit to make ads for its period tracking app Spot On. When I downloaded my off-Facebook data in January, an outdated version of the Spot On app on my phone had recently pinged Facebook’s servers (this stopped once I updated the app).
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The organization decided that it was worth losing access to some of Facebook’s targeting capabilities in exchange for better user privacy in this instance.
Good on Planned Parenthood for doing the right thing and removing the Facebook tracking. But it’s shocking that developers are ignorant to the tracking embedded in these frameworks and libraries.
Read ‘Planned Parenthood let Facebook track how often I logged my period’ on the Fast Company site.