Report: Facebook Users Are Tracked by an Average of 2,230 Advertisers

A troubling new report from the consumer advocates at Consumer Reports shows that our online tracking problems are much more than expected: The average Facebook user is tracked by 2,230 advertisers and personal data brokers, and over 186,000 companies are tracking Facebook users overall.

And you thought the new Outlook was a nightmare. (It is.)

“Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network,” Consumer Reports’ Jon Keegan writes. “On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data. Participants downloaded an archive of the previous three years of their data from their Facebook settings, then provided it to Consumer Reports.”

As is the case with the recent new Outlook controversy, sure, we all know that we’re being tracked online, but it’s another thing entirely to be confronted with the unbelievable scope of these activities. Consumer Reports says that this study was a unique chance to examine how someone’s personal information secretly travels between these ad/data broker companies and Facebook parent company Meta using a method called server-to-server tracking. And much of this tracking occurs outside of Meta’s apps, including even physical retail stores, as many retailers are among the advertisers participating in Meta’s system.

“We offer a number of transparency tools to help people understand the information that businesses choose to share with us, and manage how it’s used,” Meta told The Markup, which collaborated on this study with Consumer Reports.

That’s true, Consumer Reports says, but those tools don’t tell the full story. Among the issues, over 7,000 of the companies that are tracking us were identified using “unreadable gibberish, or just numbers that don’t mean anything to most users.” And even companies with readable names often did not include links to the company’s website. Other names, like Viking, are ambiguous and could be one of any number of different businesses, the publication adds.

“We will continue to invest in data minimization technologies to keep up with evolving expectations,” a Meta statement adds. “As we cover in our terms, businesses are responsible for getting permission to share people’s information with companies like ours.”