this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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It was that combined with the fact that they create shadow profiles for your unborn child when your wife is pregnant. (Found out through FB being allowed to track your browsing history even off the app). That was the final straw right after the Cambridge Analytica issue.
Wait what the bloody fuck? I haven't heard anything about this. Sounds right up their alley, but what evidence is it based on?
If you look up the practical application of Shadow profiles they have the ability to gather information about non-users, which also includes unborn children in the case of them discovering that the mother is pregnant through whatever web searches that they may be doing even outside of Facebook. The whole science of Shadow profiles used to strengthen the algorithm is incredibly frightening and part of the reason why I left Facebook.
I can almost excuse shadow profiles for things like "two people both have X contact in their phone", but making them for unborn children? Lord have mercy. That's genuinely crazy. It makes me wonder if it's something like they just marked someone as pregnant based on searches (weird, but maybe acceptable, idk) and it got taken out of context? Hopefully? Either way it's icky.
I hadn't heard of this either but here's an article about Facebook keeping shadow profiles on non-users that references an article from 2012 where Target's data collection determined a teen girl was pregnant before she told her dad
Target didn’t figure out a teenager was pregnant before her father did, and that one article that said they did was silly and bad.