The One Where Everyone Is Listening

Are our phones and computers listening to everything we say? How does my Facebook know that I was just talking to my friends about the concert coming to town next month and all of sudden Facebook has an ad on my News Feed for tickets? Or, how does Facebook know exactly what pair of jeans I have been eyeing at the store? According to a June, 2016 article by Facebook, they DON'T use our phones or computers microphones for advertising purposes but instead they gather information based on our interests and other information we share on our profiles. 

So how does Facebook, or any social media site, know SO much about us and what we like to do, eat, and wear? For years,  we are users of these social networking sites have build a target profile for ourselves. Not just the profile we physically typed in with our name, date of birth, location, but all the Pages we "Like" and "Share", the Groups we are apart of, the Ads we click on, the third party apps we link to our Facebook like Pandora, Spotify, TicketMaster, and gaming apps, and all the comments and posts we create, are all helping Facebook and other social networks to get to know you. Advertisers use that wide range of data Facebook has on us, to target us to product we may like or products we directly looked at on another site. While this is very helpful many times, its also a bit.. creepy!

Are we all oversharing on the Internet? Is this a violation of privacy if Facebook is essentially selling or giving out this information about us to retailers and other companies? Social media is a place where many people tend to overshare. When you think about the information you share online, do you ever wonder where all that data is going and who has access to it and for how long? Or do you enjoy that you get perfectly targeted ads after just mentioning or Googling something? 

I know for me, I don't mind the targeted ads but I do worry that everything I say, post, like, or do online and on social media is out there for others to find and use, so I take that into consideration before I click the post or submit button. If only everyone was that cautious of what they said on the Internet...