Facebook has information on people who don’t even use the site

With all the recent Cambridge Analytica controversy going on, Facebook users have been feeling insecure because of their privacy being invaded, but who knew that data of even those who aren't on the social media site has also been breached.  

If people who never signed up on Facebook are all calm thinking their information is safe, they might want to rethink as the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified during his testimony that the company even had information about internet users who have not signed up on Facebook.

Answering to a question, Zuckerberg said that the company tracks non-Facebook users for security reasons. “In general we collect data on people who are not signed up for Facebook for security purposes,” Zuckerberg said, as reported by Fortune.

To this the questioner, U.S. Representative Ben Luján (a New Mexico Democrat), replied that the practice creates ‘shadow profiles’. “You said everyone controls their data, but you’re collecting data on people who are not even Facebook users, that have never signed a consent, a privacy agreement,” Lujan said.

As per Zuckerberg, this data collection was in order to prevent malicious actors from gathering public information from Facebook users, such as names. He said, “We need to know when somebody is trying to repeatedly access our services.”

However, a former Facebook employee, Antonio Garcia Martinez tweeted that Zuckerberg’s description was incomplete and this data its collected for ‘growth reasons as well’, in order to make sure that people have the correct friend suggestions when they sign up for the first time.

Gizmodo has reported that the social media site builds ‘shadow profiles’ of the non-users through accessing data from inboxes and smartphone contacts of the site’s active users. Luján also said the when Facebook’s non –users want to know what data the company hold regarding them, they are directed to sign up for the service, “We’ve got to fix that.”