Moreover, I have noticed that whenever I travel for work or pleasure, Facebook continues to keep track of my location and use it for advertising: a trip to Glacier national park resulted in an ad for activities in Whitefish, Montana a trip to Cambridge, MA, in an ad for a business there and a visit to Herzliya, Israel, in an ad for a business there. At the most revealing end, users may be happy to enable “location services” for Facebook, allowing their iPhone to provide ultra-precise location data to the company, or they may “check in” to shops, restaurants and theatres, telling the social network where they are on a sporadic basis.īut while users can decide to give more information to Facebook, Korolova revealed they cannot decide to stop the social network knowing where they are altogether nor can they stop it selling the ability to advertise based on that knowledge.ĭespite going to as much trouble as possible to minimise the location data received by the social network, the researcher wrote, “Facebook showed me ads targeted at ‘people who live near Santa Monica’ (which is where I live) or ‘people who live or were recently near Los Angeles’ (which is where I work). Facebook users can control to an extent how much information they give the company about their location.

Does facebook track ip address