It’s no secret that Facebook collects mass amounts of data about its users. But the company now known as Meta also gathers information about non-users. So data-focused tech pub The Markup has partnered with Mozilla’s Rally team to learn more about how that process works.
Details about this data collection will, fittingly enough, be gleaned by collecting data. Rally is tracking this endeavor on its website as the “Facebook Pixel Hunt.” (It’s also conducting studies with Stanford and Princeton into how people use search engines or read news stories.)
“According to its own privacy policy,” Rally says, “Facebook may collect information about you across the web even if you don’t have a Facebook account. One way Facebook performs this tracking is through a network of ‘pixels‘ that may be installed on many of the sites you visit. By joining this study, you will help Rally and The Markup investigate and report on where Facebook is tracking you and what kind of information they are collecting.”
Rally says it will collect the full URL, time spent browsing, and the scrolling behavior for each page its participants visit in addition to the following information:
- The data sent to Facebook pixels as you browse
- The URLs of the web pages you browse
- The time you spend browsing pages
- The presence of Facebook login cookies in your browser
- A study survey that the user completes
The group assures would-be participants that “all efforts to aggregate and analyze the data will be done in Mozilla’s secure analysis environment” and that “after completion of analysis we will delete all raw data.” It also won’t share data with third parties, and Rally says The Markup’s reporting will be based on “aggregated, anonymized data” rather than identifiable information. Anyone comfortable with those terms can participate after installing Rally’s browser add-on.
It would be fair to question how Meta will respond to the Facebook Pixel Hunt. The company shut down similar research efforts throughout 2021: It banned New York University researchers investigating political ad spending from its platform in August 2021, which prompted AlgorithmWatch researchers to reveal that their efforts to study Instagram were halted, too. It also permanently banned the developer of a browser extension called “Unfollow Everything.”
Facebook has justified these moves by saying that it wants to protect the privacy of its users. In the NYU researchers’ case, it cited a 2019 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, but the FTC said in a letter that Facebook’s claim was inaccurate. But still the company has claimed that it’s protecting user privacy by preventing outside researchers from conducting opt-in studies designed to defend their participants.
Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
