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48,000 companies sent Facebook data on a single person


The data fueling Facebook ad targeting comes from other companies.

Facebook gets data on individual users from many thousands of companies, and a new study( PDF) from Consumer Reports tried to put more exact numbers on it. The researchers believed that the ease of “microtargeting” campaigns to specific user data accounted for the fact that 96,000 of the companies listed were only targeting one of the volunteers. Large retailers like The Home Depot, Walmart, or Amazon showed up, too, while other smaller businesses were “surprisingly well represented,” such as a car dealership in a 24,665-person town in Texas that covered 10 percent of the study’s volunteers on its own.

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