An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Researchers at Mozilla announced this week the launch of its "Facebook Pixel Hunt" study, which seeks to track the company's immense web-wide tracking network and investigate the intel it's collecting on users. The study is focused on a piece of tracking tech known as the "Facebook pixel." These tiny pieces of tech are buried in millions of websites across the web, from online stores to news outlets. These sites can track their own visitors and microtarget ads with the same precision you'd expect from a data-hungry company like Facebook, if they sign up for a free pixel on their site.
Facebook requires that this data be shared with it, too, in exchange for giving these sites the power to track every pageview, purchase, search query, and much, much more. In cases where a website visitor has an account on a Facebook platform, offsite data gets put into the hands of the social network. If they don't have a Facebook account, the company collects that data and uses it to create a "shadow profile" of that person. If you're a Firefox user, you can help the team with this study. The reporters from the Markup and Mozilla collaborated to gather information about Facebook's tracking of its users using a free-to-download browser extension. The time spent on different web pages, the URLs that the browser visits, and more are all tracked by the extension. The only data that will be exported from the extension will be de-identified and not shared with any third parties.
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