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when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks

I’ve been trying to get Facebook to disclose shadow contact information to users for almost a year now. But it has even refused to disclose these shadow details to users in Europe, where privacy law is stronger and explicitly requires companies to tell users what data it has on them.

To test the shadow information finding, the researchers tried a real-world test. They uploaded a list of hundreds of landline numbers from Northeastern University. These are numbers that people who work for Northeastern are unlikely to have added to their accounts, though it’s very likely that the numbers would be in the address books of people who know them and who might have uploaded them to Facebook in order to “find friends.” The researchers found that many of these numbers could be targeted with ads, and when they ran an ad campaign, the ad turned up in the Facebook news feed of Mislove, whose landline had been included in the file; I confirmed this with my own test targeting his landline number.

“I think that many users don’t fully understand how ad targeting works today: that advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by uploading the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names+dates of birth, etc,” said Mislove. “In describing this work to colleagues, many computer scientists were surprised by this, and were even more surprised to learn that not only Facebook, but also Google, Pinterest, and Twitter all offer related services. Thus, we think there is a significant need to educate users about how exactly targeted advertising on such platforms works today.”

There are certainly creepier practices happening in the advertising industry, but it’s troubling this is happening at Facebook because of its representations about letting you control your ad experience. It’s disturbing that Facebook is reducing the privacy of people who want their accounts to be more secure by using the information they provide for that purpose to data-mine them for ads.

When I asked the company last year about whether it used shadow contact information for ads, it gave me inaccurate information, and it hadn’t made the practice clear in its extensive messaging to users about ads

just 21% said their companies have an incident management plan in place for fraud or privacy breaches, only 33% have a general social media policy (that’s up from 23% two years ago), and only 59% have performed a social media risk assessment. 44% of execs surveyed said their company doesn’t have a policy for securing mobile devices. On the positive side, 72% of executives said their companies hadn’t experienced social media fraud… yet.

66% said they see their organizations using social media more over the next year, and 68% said social media will be critical for corporate efforts in the future. The top applications are brand awareness (38%), recruiting (27%), and customer identification (14%). Just 1% said they thought social media was a waste of time.

For now, it will capture websites that use Facebook's conversion tracking pixel -- which advertisers affix to see if their Facebook ads are yielding sales and traffic -- as well as mobile apps that use Facebook's software development kit to deploy Facebook services, like the log-in. Websites and apps that have Facebook's tracking software encoded to retarget their visitors are also in the mix. Impressions tracked via the "like" button encoded in mobile apps -- which Facebook recently introduced at its f8 conference for developers -- will also be included.

Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram see the highest number of logins per day, with 51.9% of Snapchat users reporting 9 or more logins per day. Twitter and Instagram saw similar devotion, with 43% and 45% of users reporting 9 or more logins a day.