Something unpleasant has been revealed on Facebook and Instagram

Facebook and Instagram appear to monitor minors’ browsing activity and use the data for advertising purposes.

Another very unpleasant detail came to light about how Facebook and Instagram, part of the Meta umbrella company, work. The Guardian reported by a recent study came to the conclusion that uses software to social networking sites and photo-sharing platforms, which captures the minor users’ browsing activities and collected.

In July, the company announced that advertisers could reach young users with their ads based on three filters – age, gender, location – rather than specific information such as their interests. However, a joint investigation by the Global Action Plan, Reset Australia, which is campaigning to reform large technology companies, and Fairplay, which is campaigning against advertising to children, found that Facebook monitors and collects minors’ browsing habits.

The organizations created three fake accounts: one pretended to be a 13-year-old and two 16-year-olds. They were also able to see what data the company was collecting about them while browsing the internet.

Experts have found that Facebook can collect information about the browser pages you open and get information about which button they clicked on that page, what terms they searched for, what products they bought or put in their virtual cart. The paper says experts say the social network has no reason to do so unless you use this information to display ads.

According to The Guardian, Meta denies that its algorithm, responsible for displaying ads on Facebook and Instagram, would use this data to show ads to people under 18.

In this case, 44 advocacy organizations wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg urging the company to stop collecting data aimed at children.