According to a letter addressed to two US Senators, it says that even if someone doesn’t enable the location services, Facebook is still able to locate the said person. Based on information gathered from their activities and “connection to its services”. Some examples include gathering information from a location-tagged video or getting tagged by a friend. Another method that Facebook is able to track a user’s location without location services is via their IP address. However, the letter has pointed out that this method is the most inaccurate and imprecise of the two.
When questioned about these location tracking methods, Facebook says that its actions are reasonable, as it still needs to access your location in order to appropriately filter out the relevant ads and sponsored content for each user. Unsurprisingly, the social media giant’s response did not amuse the two US Senators. Privacy is clearly an ongoing and recurring theme with Facebook. Back in July, Facebook agreed to a US$5 billion (~RM20.7 billion) privacy settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Prior to that, it was discovered that it had stored the user passwords of 600 million users in plain text.
The most recent mishap saw the social network’s employees’ banking data being stolen by a petty thief. Worst still, all that data was reportedly unencrypted, meaning that any and all parts of that data could be accessed by anyone. (Source: 9to5Mac // Image: Engadget)
