The Times

Meta Investigation: ‘Every Scary Thing Meta Knows About Me – And You’

2024

Data journalist Matilda Davies at the Times chose to access all of the data Meta had collected on her since she was eleven years old in 2007. She begins:

“March 14, 2022, was an ordinary day. I snoozed my alarm at 7.15am and then again at 7.30am. I checked on a prescription at 10.25am, scanned my bank balance at 2.40pm and bought a birthday card for my father at 4.05pm.

“I didn’t record these mundane actions, but Facebook did.”

In her article, Matilda notes that at least 70 per cent of the UK population – more than 47 million people – use a platform owned by Meta at least once a month: “It’s not just the data that we upload to its platforms, but a whole empire of data about other activities that is fed back, allowing Meta to customise and optimise its ad business, which brought them $131 billion (£105 billion) in global revenue last year.”

Matilda began investigating after noting that Meta knew she had been in a relationship for three years – yet this was not something she had ever posted on social media.

Matilda dived into 15 years’ worth of data, receiving almost 20,000 pages of information – which included “every party invitation, holiday snap, and regrettable Facebook status update”, as well as almost 20,000 interactions over two years “with websites and apps that aren’t connected to my Meta accounts,” noting that the presentation of the data was not user-friendly and took her and another data journalist a week and extensive coding to analyse.

Matilda’s investigation revealed every time that Meta had tracked her on a third-party website or app in a 24-hour period, with the data “covering about every facet of [Matilda’s] life.”

Meta had tracked her health data, noting her prescription orders via LloydsDirect and when she booked GP appointments on eMed, as well as logging that she had browsed NHS Trust’s website four times as well as her sign up to a stem cell register. She said: “I may have accepted Meta’s terms and conditions, and agreed to its long privacy policy, but being tracked for my health inquiries still feels intrusive.”

Meta had also tracked her visits to mental health charity website, Mind, and the UK Council for Psychotherapy’s database, as well as tracking when she visited the website of the bereavement support charity Cruse.

It was also revealed that Meta had been notified when she opened a banking app – and how many times, as well as the date for when she had submitted her credit card application, when she sought advice on her pension, when she had placed bets and when she had retrieved her winnings.

The list goes on – Matilda’s alarm app was tracked by Meta, along with any use of taxi apps, train ticket apps and when she used her Tesco Clubcard. The investigation revealed the extent to which data is collected and how it is used by Big Tech. Matilda goes on to write: “Perhaps naively I was under the impression that, in the aftermath of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, which exposed how the private information of more than 50 million Facebook users had been used to try to influence 2016 elections for Donald Trump and Brexit, this kind of pervasive data sharing wasn’t happening. Now I know better.”