Is Facebook about to get so, so creepy and sell your data?

Been hearing rumours that social network Facebook will soon be selling all of your information to those big, bad companies, all in the name of more targeted advertising?

Whilst the warnings are based on a genuine Facebook feature soon to be introduced in the US, many warnings are a little overblown and don’t tell the whole story.

So here is what is happening…

Currently Facebook decide what adverts to show you based on what you do on Facebook itself. This includes information about you that you have given Facebook like your gender and marital status. It also includes information like what posts you share and what Pages you have liked.

So if you recently liked a Facebook Page about the beauty of garden sheds then you may expect to get some shed-related adverts appear in your newsfeed.

The latest move from Facebook, which they dub Interest-based advertising will allow Facebook to use cookie-based data stored on your computer to see what sites outside of Facebook you’ve been visiting. Cookies are small information files that many websites will leave on your computer that shows what you’ve been doing on a website.

So if you visit a fan website about garden sheds (we’re still going with the shed thing here) you may still find yourself exposed to those shed adverts on Facebook, even if you didn’t visit any shed-related material on Facebook itself.

Other large sites use this method of advertising too. Google and Yahoo being two of them.

There is some good news however, and that is for the first time in Facebook’s history, its users will have access to the interest-based advertising “dossier” Facebook has them on then, and can even amend it accordingly.

This can be accessed through a link on each post called “Why am I seeing this ad?” Clicking on this link will take a user to their Ad Preferences information. Here a user can see why Facebook chose to serve them the ad and can turn off seeing those types of adverts from appearing again (e.g. adverts about sheds). User can even “hide” from particular advertisers.

There is a [sort of] opt-out feature on a third party site known as the Digital Advertising Alliance, but this is browser specific, meaning you have to opt-out using every browser on every device on which you access Facebook. And since this site also uses an opt-out cookie, you have to do it all over again every time you clear your temporary Internet files (and thus delete all those cookies).

If you’re looking for an easier or permanent opt-out solution, there isn’t any. Unless of course you opt-out of Facebook altogether. Something that many people have decided to do.

So are Facebook selling all your data to big companies? Well no, not really. Facebook aren’t giving companies your information at all really. Your private information on Facebook is still private, like your photos and status updates. But Facebook will now have a better understanding of what you do outside of Facebook, namely the sites you visit and what you’re looking for, and they’ll use that information to provide you with more relevant adverts from those other companies.

The feature is currently rolling out in the USA, with a global rollout expect in the next few months.

Do you think Facebook are becoming more and more like Big Brother? Is this a privacy breach? Or are these warnings overblown? Let us know what you think below.