Have
Silicon Valley’s biggest companies become too powerful? This series
examines monopoly and power in the tech industry — and what, if
anything, can be done.
Facebook knows I wear glasses. I mean, it knows exactly what I look like, and can easily identify me in photos. It’s pretty sure I went to summer camp. (I did.) It knows I live in an apartment and if I won the lottery I’d like to fill that apartment with overpriced mid-century modern furniture. And it’s not my only close, intimate friend on the internet. Google can tell you everywhere I’ve been in the last month. It knows what movies I’ve been thinking of seeing. It also probably has a pretty good sense of the state of my immune system.
These companies know me so well because I’ve more or less willingly handed over all this data to them: submitting it to Facebook as profile updates and photos, and to Google as searches on maps or the web. But I’ve always wondered: Which one of my two big, friendly internet giants knows me better?A big part of what Facebook does with your information revolves around ads, so that was where I started my great data-harvest adventure. The easiest way to find out what the company already knows about you — or thinks it knows about you — is to check out your ad preferences. Facebook says it uses a list of a whopping 98 data points, from what kind of credit card (American Express) you use to whether you commute to work (yes, when the trains actually run) to determining how far you live from where you grew up (about a four-hour drive) to target ads to you. A lot of this is information you probably don’t even realize you’ve given them. Who among us can remember every single page we’ve liked or group we’ve joined?But the thing I always forget is just how good Facebook is at seeing. Facebook breaks down your preferences into categories, like “hobbies and activities,” “family and relationships,” and “lifestyle and culture.” Some of the topics within mine make sense to me — emoji, women’s rights, hiking. Some of them, uh, less so — natural selection, fuel, Bernie Madoff. Unclear what Facebook would want to sell me with that last one. Still, the things it gets right about me far outnumber the bits of information about me it gets wrong. I’m not a brunette. I have no interest in luxury cars. And I’m genuinely befuddled as to why “masculinity” appears under my education preferences. But I am a left-leaning apartment dweller, an iPhone user, and a journalist, with a birthday in March, who spends too much time on Twitter. (I feel so seen!)On the other hand, Facebook’s algorithm has a tendency to take things very literally. A shot of a plane’s wing indicates my interest in “wing tips,” but when I clicked to see sample ads for that preference, Facebook had nothing to show me — probably because I was interested in an ad for a pair of menswear-inspired shoes, not aviation. I’m not sure how to take that: Facebook knows I like wing tips, but it doesn’t know what wing tips are. Does that mean it knows me better, or worse?Google makes it a bit easier to see just how much it’s been surveilling you — the company has a handy “My Activity” dashboard where you can see everything you’ve searched, mapped, listened to or watched....
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