Today it became known about the action launched by the team of the Signal messenger. The company launched targeted ads on Instagram with many different ads that shared personal information about users. This was done in order to show what data Facebook collects about its audience.
Ultimately, each user saw the basic information about himself that the social network collects and sells access to it. Thus, people could see data about their work, geolocation, personal interests and even relationships.
As Signal says in its press release, “Facebook’s own tools can reveal things about you that no one else can. However, in the ads that appears to users; you can already see that strangers know even more about you than you do. We wanted to use the same tools to show directly how this technology works and just bought an Instagram ad”.
For example, one of the ads looks like this: “You came across this ad because you are a chemical engineer and love K-pop. This advertisement analyzes your location and sees that you are in Berlin. Your child was recently born and you have moved. You’ve been doing a lot of exercise for pregnant women lately”.
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Eventually, Facebook blocked Signal’s ad account and suspended this ad campaign. By the way, Facebook and Instagram recently announced that tracking information on iOS helps the services to remain free and sent users appropriate notifications.
Facebook User Data Leak Reveals that Mark Zuckerberg Using Signal Messenger
Earlier, it became known that a database of more than 533 million Facebook users was published on one of the hacker forums. Inter alia, in the public domain were data of Mark Zuckerberg; which, as it turned out, enjoys protected messenger Signal, and not using the company’s WhatsApp.
As a result of the sensational leak, the phone number, address, personal identifier and some other data of Mark Zuckerberg were freely available. The data of the head of Facebook was discovered by Dave Walker, a researcher working in the field of information security. Now he has revealed that Zuckerberg’s phone number is linked to an account called Signal, an end-to-end encryption messenger that is a direct competitor to Facebook’s WhatsApp service.
Facebook declined to comment on the publicly available data of the head of the company; but a comic message appeared on the Twitter account of Signal developers; regarding the information that Mark Zuckerberg uses their messenger.
As a reminder, WhatsApp’s new privacy policy suggests that the service may share user data with other companies owned by Facebook. The changes will take effect on May 15; and before that date, all WhatsApp users must agree to the new rules; otherwise they will no longer be able to use the messenger.
