Facebook Busted For Buying Your Prayers For Advertisement
As our world expands in science and technology, it places a certain burden on groups of people such as Christians. Their digital products sometimes break our privacy.
New findings have pointed out that Facebook and order digital services giants have violated the privacy of thousands to millions of Christians.
You could be one —if you have been using some of the Christian apps I’m about to mention.
Some popular Christian apps are selling users’ data to third-party companies to help them send targeted advertisements to them. This helps them to boost their revenue.
According to BuzzFeed News, big Christian Companies like Pray.com, Hallow, Bible Gateway, and Glorify all hide certain terms from their privacy policy.
You might wonder how Facebook can target you with ads about something you engaged with on pray.com. Our problem is —we don’t have time to read that long boring privacy policy. But jumps in to use any online service or products such as religious apps that are selling our data to third parties.
It feels like almost every detail we share about ourselves becomes data property for big online companies. Facebook is not alone in this. Real-life Bond villain, Peter Thiel, as well as the venture capitalist behemoth firm Andreessen Horowitz are just a couple of the other players investing resources into these apps.
For some years now, many internet users have shown fears of censorship on their ages, locations, websites they visit, gender, etc. Now is a wake-up call to everyone —especially Christians.
The worse part will be on Christians who store their prayer journals on some of these religious apps. They sneak and have unauthorized access to the prayers you prepare about your health, marriage, job, parents, loved ones, etc.
From the sides of pray.com, they claim not to sneak users’ data for third-party companies. A very big denial on the face of Christians, Buzzfeed, and all victims.
Their spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the company “does not share users’ public, private, or anonymous prayers and specific content consumption with third parties for their commercial purposes,” they failed to confirm or deny that said prayers and content are used for Pray.com’s own commercial purposes.
Meanwhile, the privacy researcher’s audit of the app revealed: “granular data” shared with multiple other companies, including Facebook.
Now we need clear answers from Facebook and other defaulters. Facebook on their part has come out saying: they’re “investigating the situation” now, for whatever that’s worth.
Google knows about the possibility of these kinds of breaches of users’ private data —so they’re working hard to put a stop to it. ‘Inputmag‘ has explained how Google will replace invasive cookies for transparency.
In their efforts, they are trying to replace tracking cookies with a program called ‘Topics API.’ This API will stop data from being shared with third parties. It will distill your most recent browsing history and make it a compound topic of guesswork.
You can get a detailed report about this from Buzzfeed.
Investigation is still ongoing and hopefully every single lie from these online companies would be exposed.
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