Facebook will track what PHYSICAL STORE you go into

[jos]

Quote

Facebook wants to show advertisers that their ads make you visit their bricks-and-mortar stores and buy their stuff. To do this, they’ll use phones’ location services to track whether people actually walk into the stores after seeing an ad.

The company’s new Local Awareness ad features will be fascinating for businesses and depressing for the rest of us. Businesses can now include a map with their ad to show users where the closest store is in case they want that $12 dress right now. So far, so good. Then, Facebook’s Offline Conversions API will match in-store visit data (tracked using the phone’s location services) with Facebook advertising data. So, H&M won’t be able to see if you individually visited after its “store locator” sent you strong subliminal messages, but it will be able to match visits with the number of people who saw that ad in their feed and felt compelled to walk in.

According to Adweek, early results from these features (which roll out in the next few months) are already good. French retailer E.Leclerc says it’s reached 1.5 million people within 10 kilometers. Of those, 12 percent of clicks (or about 180,000) led to visits within a week. That’s not a negligible number.

Facebook is planning to track how many times a week you go to the grocery store, and every other store, and it will share that information with advertisers.

Using the location services on your phone, Facebook will keep a tally of who goes to what stores, and show the anonymized numbers to advertisers, as evidence that buying ads on Facebook is getting people to visit brick-and-mortar businesses.

It's a great thing for Facebook, which will now have excellent data to prove (or disprove) on a user-to-user basis what a store is getting for its advertising dollar. But it's a pretty frightening idea that a company will have information not unlike your credit card statement all from location services data.

 

Source:Link

[Jack Longman]

Ergh this is getting to the point of being creepy to me, them tracking where i am whenever i have my gps on... next it'll be taking pictures of me on the toilet to remind me when i need to buy more toilet paper

[Droidbot]

google track my location anyway. still, facebook is just fighting for control in a world where it is becoming unpopular among the youth

[SansVarnic]

Sounds like an invasion of privacy to me. But then again if you use Facebook you agree the terms of use . . . including this bull. This why I stopped using Facebook after only a few months many years ago I saw this crap coming.  

(no I am not paranoid but it just made sense to me at the time in a logical sense)

[Zodiark1593]

Facebook is still a thing? Thought it would have gone the way of MySpace long ago.

[Thiback]

18 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Facebook is still a thing? Thought it would have gone the way of MySpace long ago.

Are you crazy ? Facebook is still blossoming. It's incredibly popular and addictive to a lot of people. I go there because I can share photos, keep touch with my friends, and wish them a happy birthday because FB reminds me to. In fact, Nowadays Facebook is a very sad second life for most users, and they won't want to quit it because it would feel like loosing a lot of social interaction all in a sudden.
.

I am also fed up of Facebook being a complete douche with personnal data. I mean sure, other companies keep track of you all the time. But Facebook is increasingly annoying these days, even keeping track of people who don't have an account (link). 
But whatever the annoyance, there is little the users can do about it. This physical store tracking thing is the next step on the asshole ladder the social network has been constantly climbing, and soon enough users will have to live with it, just as they learned to live with any other theft of their personnal informations.

[SImoHayha]

why can't they give this technology to 911 services? Did you lads know that 911 CANNOT detect our godforsaken location BUT FACEBOOK CAN?! Give this shit to 911 not for stupid ass ads that no one is going to care about.

[Zodiark1593]

12 minutes ago, Thiback said:

Are you crazy ? Facebook is still blossoming. It's incredibly popular and addictive to a lot of people. I go there because I can share photos, keep touch with my friends, and wish them a happy birthday because FB reminds me to. In fact, Nowadays Facebook is a very sad second life for most users, and they won't want to quit it because it would feel like loosing a lot of social interaction all in a sudden.

To be fair, I haven't had much reason to even look at Facebook (or other Social Media for that matter), let alone regularly use it.

[handymanshandle]

1 hour ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Facebook is still a thing? Thought it would have gone the way of MySpace long ago.

I still use it. Not a huge fan of Twitter but I guess I don't hate it since I have both. I just use Facebook more because family/friends use it. Twitter is overrated.

[MoonlightSylv]

That's why I use Swipe (it's an alternative Facebook client for Android)

[handymanshandle]

1 hour ago, ShadowTechXTS said:

That's why I use Swipe (it's an alternative Facebook client for Android)

I spend most of my time at home or at school. Google already knows where I live and where I go to school. Doesn't bother me.

[MoonlightSylv]

2 minutes ago, wcreek said:

I spend most of my time at home or at school. Google already knows where I live and where I go to school. Doesn't bother me.

I trust Google more than Facebook

[handymanshandle]

1 hour ago, ShadowTechXTS said:

I trust Google more than Facebook

I suppose Google probably would be less likely to have a data breach than Facebook.

[Jim Bryant]

and this is why if you want to use GPS, you turn it off on your phone, and simply buy a standalone GPS.

[Trik'Stari]

32 minutes ago, Jim Bryant said:

and this is why if you want to use GPS, you turn it off on your phone, and simply buy a standalone GPS.

inb4 the "I have nothing to hide, so why does it matter" crowd tells you to stop being paranoid.

[Thiback]

4 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

To be fair, I haven't had much reason to even look at Facebook (or other Social Media for that matter), let alone regularly use it.

good for you. Don't even start using it. Most people I know have made an account in their teenagehood to be in "it". Now it's very hard to quit for all of us. And it's also a very good mean to work together at the UNI to exchange files. Actually it's very practical. But that steamrolling policy of screwing users privacy over and over from Facebook though. It's very enervating.

[kasugatei]

From the day one Facebook has no access to location services on my iphone

[colonel_mortis]

A 12% conversion rate sounds really high, but the data is pretty useless without knowing how many of them were as a result of the advert, and how many were that the person was going to go to the shop regardless of the ad. The adverts are (at least in theory) targeted based on a user's interests, so the ad for the shop will be displayed to the sort of people who would already be going there. A more useful (but far more invasive) statistic would be to compare how often the person visits the shop without seeing the ad to when they have seen the ad (to be clear, I absolutely don't endorse it, I just think it would give Facebook and its advertisers more useful information).

[laminutederire]

Always about the money then, they could do so much more with those statistical analysis. They could help government doing good things, if applied to something else of course...

I'm surprise machine learning and all that stuff is so heavily used by Facebook or Google,  but no one uses it for what it could be amazing, like detecting fiscal fraud, identity theft, or even power video games AI.

[jasonvp]

7 hours ago, Ramamataz said:

why can't they give this technology to 911 services?

It's all about the $.  Given the budget (or lack thereof), they have to rely on antiquated and inaccurate cell tower triangulation versus GPS (data sent back to them via the 'net).  Their internal systems would need to be updated to be able to ping the person's phone directly and say, "Hey, gimme your GPS location!" via the Internet versus relying on the cell phone companies to provide that data from triangulation.

 

As for Facebook: just remove their terrible app from your phone and carry on.  It's... liberating.  Interact with them via your computer's browser.

[Castdeath97]

*panic deletes Facebook*

[Spectrez]

This isnt really new, they have been targeting ads based on your location since forever.

you could walk down the street and it would show ads for a nearby store all of the sudden

 

this is basicly just taking it a step further

[goodtofufriday]

Google already does this. Take a picture and itll ask you if you want to add details about the store you were just in with the picture you took. 

Heck I took a picture at my office and and it asked me to review my office.

 

It doesnt always do pictures though. Other times it just ask you genreal questions about stores that you have been to.

 

I think its because I have location tracking enabled on my phone. 

[goodtofufriday]

4 hours ago, Thiback said:

good for you. Don't even start using it. Most people I know have made an account in their teenagehood to be in "it". Now it's very hard to quit for all of us. And it's also a very good mean to work together at the UNI to exchange files. Actually it's very practical. But that steamrolling policy of screwing users privacy over and over from Facebook though. It's very enervating.

"UNI" Are you australian?

[dalomo]

12 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Facebook is still a thing? Thought it would have gone the way of MySpace long ago.

Facebook has roughly a BILLION more users than any other social media platform. Yeah it's still a thing.