Facebook Privacy Issues: Be Tracked Even When Your Phone’s Off
This March, you may have a harder time hiding from your Facebook friends. One of the upcoming developments that Facebook has for its users is an app that will track you and your friends-even when your phone is already turned off.
Now you will know who of your friends are near you, and they will be alerted of your location, reports Daily Mail.
You'd think that Facebook is doing these new developments to better serve its users. However, its new location tracking app is actually geared towards advertisers.
Knowing where to place your ad-literally
According to Decoded Science, Facebook is now moving on to mobile ads, as it already makes up 23% of their profit. This can be attributed to consumers' movements from laptops and personal computers to tablets and smartphones.
As Daily Mail reports, Facebook is gearing towards making it easier for corporate clients to tap into their audiences' lives by knowing the daily habits and daily routine that the customers have, all at the price of compromising the privacy of Facebook users.
This isn't the first time that Facebook has dabbled in the territory of tracking and location. Users even have the pinpointing their location via their statuses or when uploading photos while using the Internet of where you will be staying at.
Stalking: The new product of Facebook?
With Facebook's recent buying of Glancee, a startup company specializing in location tracking, as well as Gowalla, a location-based social network, now allows the social networking giant to record GPS locations even when the device is turned off.
According to Digital Trends, Facebook has already reserved the right to push with the location-tracking app, considering how they have stated in their policy that information, such as IP addresses, identifiers of browsers, Internet service provider, and location can be received and stored once a user accesses Facebook.
So does this mean that Facebook is now a potential tool for stalking? For the meantime, the app is said to be limited to your Facebook friends, so strangers won't have access to your location information.
But it may be only a matter of time until Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team find a way to compromise users' privacy for ad profitability in the changing platform of Facebook.