Facebook Shadow Profiles (2022) [pdf]

After recent news of FB offering paid subscriptions in the EU[1], I think it's important to remember they still largely exploit their users and non-users, via incessant tracking and shadow profiles.

One aspect this paper doesn't answer, and probably nobody outside FB _can_ answer, is what are these profiles used for? They can't possibly be only for giving potential new users a better onboarding experience; that's a lot of data to keep around for a minor percentage of new signups. I speculate they make a profit off of it on the $300bn data broker market, even though FB has denied selling user data. I don't trust anything they say publicly, so I'm curious what HN thinks, since all we can do is speculate.

This was previously discussed in 2022 with 145 comments[2].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38068635

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30389905