48,000 companies sent Facebook data on a single person
The data fueling Facebook ad targeting comes from other companies.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
Researchers found that, on average, Facebook received data from 2,230 different companies for each of the 709 volunteers.
Volunteers recruited with help from The Markup pulled their personal data from Facebook using its Download Your Information tool and shared it with the researchers.
Companies using Meta’s advertising platform upload customers’ personal information and buying habits, which Meta uses to serve targeted ads to those people or people with similar profiles.
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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