If You Use a Ring Doorbell, Facebook Is Tracking You

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says Ring’s Android app is sending your data to Facebook.

Most people realize that Facebook tracks what you do online so that it can serve you targeted ads. They may not like it, but they sort of accept that the price of a free social media platform is a little bit of privacy. Most people have come to accept that even though it’s a little creepy that you see ads for the items you were just looking at on Amazon in your Facebook News Feed, it’s not that big a deal.

What most people don’t realize is just how much information Facebook collects not just about what you do on the world’s largest social media site, but what you do on other websites and in the apps on your smartphone. In fact, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a privacy advocacy group, that tracking includes what you do with the Ring doorbell app for your Android device.

Ring is owned by Amazon, which did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

According to EFF’s report, the Ring app for Android sends information via Facebook’s Graph.API, including “time zone, device model, language preferences, screen resolution, and a unique identifier (anon_id), which persists even when you reset the OS-level advertiser ID.” In addition, the fact that Ring is sending data to Facebook is not included in the app’s current privacy policy.

As the second-largest advertising platform, Facebook’s tracking code is found in many of the apps you use every day, and it is notorious for being one of the biggest culprits when it comes to collecting your personal information. That’s true even if you don’t use Facebook’s app, or even have a Facebook account.

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